Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Two
Miss Trojczakowski happened upon Sri Gangakanta moping around the lobby the next morning, so invited him for a coffee. Aloysius rudely dumped a couple cups on their table: the drinks were more yellow than brown, as, by order of the management, the dwindling supply of coffee beans had to be rationed to a few scattered smithereens, mixed in with an untraceable number of dead insects, per cup.
After some muttered comments from Gangakanta on the futility of existence and the impossibility that someone could ever find it in their heart to love him—two conclusions with which Enid, if she were going to be authentic to herself, could not truthfully disagree—and some monosyllabic grunts about the weather, the subject of the duchess’s recent transplantation from Earth to another, posited realm reared its head, occasioning the last time the murder investigation would be discussed.
“Perhaps the footman,” Gangakanta threw out. “Perhaps he was jealous.”
“Or Herr Voot?”
“It could not have been a frustrated suitor; her highness made herself available, as I understand it, to anyone who wanted her.”
“But would the footman have had anything against any of the previous victims? Or is it a stream of isolated murderers we’re talking about?”
Gangakanta had long since lost the manners which would have compelled him to refrain from yawning in a lady’s presence, or even to cover his mouth whilst so doing. “Who knows?” he concluded.
“Who would want Sanns, or the coronel, or Snede, or the duchess, dead?” Enid persisted, not because the answer, if there were one, mattered to her greatly, but because she dreaded the thought of returning their conversation to the thoroughly depleted topic of the weather.
“Surely it would be an impossibility to spend any time of consequence on this earth without brushing against a slew of fellow human beings who would rather see you painfully destroyed,” submitted Gangakanta.
Enid tried the coffee, spat it out, pushed the cup away, and went on: “Four people have now been murdered.”
“Five,” corrected Gangakanta, without enthusiasm. “We musn’t omit Inspector Pluck.”
“Inspector Pluck. . .!” Enid stopped, and stared into the air. She’d forgotten all about him. His name breathed out from her lips like a character in a fairy tale read and assimilated long ago, but never consciously dwelt upon since girlhood. “You’re right. Five.”
“But we know who killed him.” Gangakanta was sure they’d had this conversation before—or had he dreamt it?
“Can we take it for granted that whoever killed the others would not have been too faint-hearted to partake in the death of the inspector?”
“We cannot, I think.”
“All right.” Enid wished she had some real coffee. She closed her eyes for a moment, imagined it, then opened them and continued. “Is there one man who has motives—”
“Or woman.”
“—I grant you—who has motives for killing them all?”
Gangakanta had stopped listening. Their discussion had taken on the tone of two sad old men in a gentleman’s club, fat and sated with cigars, hypothesising over what would have happened had cricketeer B been to bat in place of cricketeer A. Instead, he stared into the shafts of sickly light which floundered through the windows and onto the tables; at the anonymous motes fluttering between columns of nothingness. How much better to have been incarnated as one of those, he thought. How much less painful. How much more peaceful.
“I can’t see why it shouldn’t be two separate persons—or even a different killer for each victim,” Enid mused. Gangakanta looked over, surprised and a little annoyed to discover that the conversation was still going. “Or a pack! A cabal! Or, entirely disconnected phenomena. Directly, I mean; indirectly, all linked: after each murder, a new person took heart—that is to say, courage—from the example, and applied it to their own ends.”
“The act of murder,” Gangakanta thought aloud, “normalised. Simply one tool in the toolbox for resolving disputes.”
“The chain connecting man sympathetically to man—you understand that by the word ‘man’, I refer to all mankind—by which I mean, ‘humankind’—the chain breaking, link by link, till civilisation has collapsed!”
“Or. . .” Gangakanta began to posit, hazily, “there was only one murderer, all along, who sought to inject the germ of chaos into the population, by framing suspect after suspect, then picking them off.”
“Until. . .what? Only he is left?”
“The last man,” Gangakanta nodded, somewhat in awe. “Who, through the elimination of all other sentient life, has sired himself God.”
It was all too confusing for Enid; she wanted to shake it from her mind, grasp at the receding images of Rosella and Genevra, and cleave them to her breast forevermore, notions of murder mysteries be damned.
It was as if Gangakanta had read her thoughts (he had not): “What does any of it matter, really? Come on. You know it’s true. A handful of people, dead today instead of tomorrow? It’s not as if any of these particular specimens of humanity had ever stopped in the tracks of their meaningless pursuits to consider what any of it was for, you’ve got to admit. And even the survivors—to the extent that any of us still alive is not properly so called—has the recognition of their proximity to violent death changed how they live their lives? How they perceive reality? Has it, for lack of a better phrase, penetrated their skulls at all? Or has it just reinforced what they’ve secretly known in their hearts all along: that all is for nought?”
Enid watched him close his eyes and rest his forehead against his fingertips. He’s given up, she thought. He might pass away right now. And who could blame him? There were only a few others in the dining room just then. A light clinking of spoons sprinkled itself around them. Enid watched the others. She felt no connection to them. They could kill each other, and, so long as she and her loved ones were spared, she couldn’t honestly pretend to mind. They were a rotten bunch, all of them, she decided. And if they said the same of her? Well, fair enough.
The chair was cold under her buttocks. She imagined the chair were replaced by Rosella’s lips, and she became warm all over.
But then, as if writ on a paper carried this way and that on the wind, finally, circuitously, arrived in her hand, came Gangakanta’s last words, delayed, to her ear. His was an insouciance of vast profundity; a detachment far grander than hers. What if he—he—had been the murderer? Who had done it all as some cold-hearted, stoical, moral experiment? Which had resulted in the complete corruption of his psyche, leaving him. . .like this?
But he was still talking: “It might be less corporal than that,” he was suggesting, his brow unmoved from his hand. “It might be a sort of karmic chain of death, in which each victim was really the murderer of the previous victim. Through their own will, or not. It might be that, after all, we are far more closely linked than we’ve ever realised—to our own profound damnation.”
The encircling murmur of the other diners’ conversation, and its unflaggingly casual tone, seemed to swirl closer and closer round Enid, until she could practically feel it clenching her neck. A vision of the deep inside of Rosella’s vagina flashed before her eyes, like a mercifully beckoning angel at the point of one’s death. As the sounds tightened their hold on her, so did the remembered sensation of Genevra’s and Rosella’s lips tightening their embouchure around her nipples. Dimly, amidst all this, Gangakanta’s words tumbled, their intended meaning slippery-handled, to Enid’s ear:
“. . .many people sharing the same dream? Or one dreamer, who is none of us?”
She had to lower her head and hold herself in both hands before she could block out the extraneous sensations and recover herself. She took another sip of coffee, spat it out and blinked herself back to the present.
“Anyway,” Gangakanta was saying, “do you think this snow will ever stop?”
The upshot of their conversation, when it concluded, was their joint decision to close the investigation. In summary, they agreed, the identity, motives, and particulars of the murderer or murderers simply did not matter.