Chapter Fourteen
The evening saw several hands of bridge, baccarat and other games played in the ballroom. Pluck, shirt clean and pressed, jacket dusted, bow tie tight, entered the room, to be met with stares of fear, glares of hatred and squints of curiosity. A few people laughed at an old lady’s winnings; she had cleaned them out, it appeared. When he went over to offer his congratulations, she returned him a cold look, got up without a word and went off to the toilet. He couldn’t understand it. He followed her, straight into the ladies’ room, on principle.
When she was about to enter a cubicle to relieve herself, she turned round and saw him there, alone beside her.
“Get out of here!” she choked.
“Why don’t you get out of here?” he countered. “After all, I was here first.”
“No you were not, you impudent idiot!” she seethed. “You followed me in here!”
He laughed, delightfully. “I beg to differ.”
“You do know this is the ladies’ room, don’t you?”
“Ha! You take me for a fool, madame!”
“What was that?”
“I said that you take me for a fool! Of course this isn’t the men’s room!”
“I know that it isn’t!”
“No, I mean—I meant to say that of course this isn’t the ladies’ room!”
“The what?!”
“The—are you hard of hearing, madame?”
“I’m rather deaf, it so happens. I’ve left my ear trumpet at the table.”
“So you can play a trumpet with your ear, now, can you, madame? Ha! That’s about as likely as this being the ladies’ room!”
Two ladies came in.
“Get out of here!” screamed Pluck. “This is an abode for men, and for criminal suspects like this old lady here!”
“This is the ladies’ room,” countered one of the women, unruffled.
Sighing at the shenanigans he was forced to undergo, Pluck grabbed each of the two women by an arm and escorted them outside, then turned them all round to have a look at the door, which read Ladies. He stared at it for several minutes—stories often say “for several minutes”, really meaning just a few seconds, especially if in the midst of dialogue, as several minutes of silence in the middle of a conversation would, I’m sure you, Reader, would agree, prove very awkward indeed; but here, I really, truly do mean several minutes of staring at the sign in bafflement, during which he held onto the arms of the ladies—before he finally shouted, “What perverted idiot has switched the signs?!”
The old lady, assuming that Pluck would have left the outside of the ladies’ room by now, chose that moment to exit; Pluck immediately drew her into the men’s room (or, as he would have it, the ladies’ room mis-signed) and sat her down on the toilet.
“Get your hands off me! I shall call for help!”
“I only want to ask you a few questions!”
“Let me out of the men’s room at once!”
“Ah, but you forget that this is not the men’s room, madame.”
“What did you say?!”
“Shall I shout it into your ear, in lieu of a trombone?”
“What’s that?”
He sighed, though to no purpose, as she could not hear it. He spoke, at volume: “I said that this is not the men’s room!”
Two men entered the room.
“Get out!” Pluck screamed. “This is the ladies’ room! Read the sign, you brainless oafs!”
The men withdrew. Pluck turned to the lady, still sat on the toilet. “Just tell me, madame—”
“What?”
“Just tell me—what have you got against me?”
“What?”
“What have you got against me?”
“What have I got against you?”
“Yes!” He nodded his head in an exaggerated sweep.
“Do you mean, besides ruining everyone’s holiday, throwing the place into irrational fear and mindless intimidation of my fellow guests?”
Pluck thought. “Yes, besides that,” he said.
“And besides destroying half the furnishings, insulting the staff and sowing an atmosphere of violent disgruntlement throughout the building?”
“Yes, yes, besides all that! What have you got against me?”
She raised her hand.
“Yes! Yes, yes, you in the front—what is it?! What have you got to say?! You needn’t raise your hand, you know, to be called on, seeing as we’re the only two people conversing!”
“Will you take a look at my hand?”
“I don’t have my magnifying glass with me. Just sit there until I come back, discharge your dung if you must, it’ll only take a minute. . .” But his trained, incisive eyes picked out, unenhanced by any deductive tool, a peculiar wrapping of some sort around her hand.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Pardon?”
“On your hand—I noticed some sort of wrapping. Come, now, you needn’t try to deny it. It’s right there.”
“What are you babbling about, you brainless worm?!”
“Is that some sort of artificial skin, meant to hide a brand—a tattoo designating membership in a secret, anarchic society, by any chance?!” He seized her hand.
“Let go of me!”
“Give me that!”
She pushed past him and out of the room. He gave chase. Several men interrupted their game of whist in order to hold Pluck as the old woman pointed at him, claiming: “That idiot of an inspector trapped me in the men’s room!”
“Don’t be absurd!” he protested. Appealing to the gentlemen: “Why, ha-ha, she wouldn’t know a men’s room if she stumbled into it and it was full of naked, urinating men, ha-ha!”
“I will call the manager!” she threatened.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Pluck retorted, “seeing how both the manager and the acting manager are currently suspects in a murder investigation. That sort of puts a damper on their moral authority, wouldn’t you say, madame?”
“Pardon?”
“Exactly, ‘pardon’, ‘pardon’, she says! And that’s about all she says, of worth.”
“Here, here, Inspector,” protested one of the men. “Don’t you think an old lady like this—”
“Gentlemen, I submit that this old lady is neither old, nor a lady.”
“Then what is she?” asked the gentleman, whose ears spread outwards rather comically, Pluck thought (though he kept that to himself, so as to make easier avail of the man’s sympathy).
“What’s that?” asked the lady.
“I said, ‘What are you?’” said the man more loudly.
“What do you mean?!” she asked, ostensibly offended.
“Ask her about the anarchists,” Pluck prompted.
“What’s that?” asked the lady.
“What’s that?” asked the man.
“She’s a member of a secret anarchist society,” Pluck explained.
The man with the broad ears turned to the old lady and asked, “Are you a member of a secret anarchist society?”
“What’s that?”
More loudly: “Do you want to destroy the world?”
“No! Do you?”
“No!”
“Well, all right then.” She nodded with approval. Then, pointing at Pluck: “But he does.”
“You are a villain, madame!” Pluck exclaimed. “And if you weren’t a lady, I would demand satisfaction from you.”
“You just said she wasn’t a lady,” said the second man, whose ears were normal-sized but whose Adam’s apple protruded peculiarly.
“Well, but she’s dressed like a lady,” Pluck explained. “Could you imagine me on the field of valour combatting a young man dressed like an old lady? Even after I’d vanquished her, we would be forced to disrobe her in public, exposing the dead man’s genitals to the elements and the vultures, in a thoroughly undignified proceeding. How embarrassing would that be, gentlemen, I ask you?”
The two men laughed, and agreed that it would be preferable not to go down that route. The old lady had no idea what they were talking about.
“So, what’s this about her being an anarchist, eh?” asked the man with the ears.
Pluck nodded to her hand. “Just pull off that wrapping, and I’ll show you.”
The man went to take the lady’s hand, but she pulled it away (very unsporting of her, really). Then, as if her disinclination to allow her bandage to be unwrapped hadn’t been competently communicated by that gesture, she appended an oral reiteration: “Leave my hand alone!”
According her protest all the respect it deserved, Pluck grabbed her hand and tore off the bandage; she screamed, annoyingly, and drew, inevitably, the attention of the entire room. Pluck was used to being in the limelight, on account of his celebrated cases, and so revelled in displaying to the assembled guests the burn mark on the old lady’s hand.
“Aha!” he exclaimed, loudly enough for everyone, including the old lady, to hear. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the sign of the secret society of anarchists—a society bent on the destruction of government, private property, family, and all species of plants. Behold—the sign, on the hand of one of its villainous matriarchs; a sign cloaked to appear as—a scald mark!”
“It is a scald mark, you cretin!” the old lady shouted. “It’s from the eggs that fell on me!”
“And why would eggs fall on you, madame—perhaps they fell from the sky?” He smiled to the room, but his little joke failed to garner a laugh.
“No, they fell from a plate held by a waiter who was tripped!”
“What idiot did that?!” Pluck looked out into the furthest reaches of the room in his impromptu search for the scoundrel.
“You did, moron!”
He snarled at her, and grabbed her by the wrist: “If I did, madame, I can only thank myself, in retrospect, for having the forethought, at the time, to look ahead into the future and recognise the leader of a secret cell plotting the destruction of the earth!”
A little (obviously) Pekingese scurried across the ballroom floor, cutting between ankles and shortcutting under tables, from somewhere, having telepathically ascertained that her mistress was in danger. It reached her and, seeing the brute who held her by the wrist, leapt up and yapped at him; Pluck dropped the wrist and ran through the room in a panic. Upon reaching the door out of the ballroom, Pluck turned back to his opponent and shouted:
“You might have been saved by that feral beast this time, madame; but when next we meet, I promise you that I will be the dog!”