Chapter Twenty-Nine
The old soldier, Eyague Feosalma, had fought for tyrants and against tyrants. So it was that when, in the morning, that overmuscled gentleman Bartoff practically smashed down the door to his room, wrenched him from his sickbed and manhandled him all the way to Pluck’s suite, where he threw him onto the inspector’s bed, still in his nightclothes, it felt, not unreasonably, like old times.
“Oh, good morning, my old friend!” Pluck, in a natty white bathrobe and bare feet, greeted him. “Thank you for coming.”
“Did you send that brute for me?” the coronel inquired, forgetting any friendly salutation.
“I asked Mister Bartoff to escort you to my room, in case you should get lost, yes. I’m well aware of your advanced age, mon ami, and for that reason—”
“I will leave you to your ravings,” spat the coronel, and rose to leave.
“Your voice is somewhat hoarse, my friend,” Pluck, ever the observer, observed. “Might I inquire as to why?”
The coronel stopped where he was and turned back to Pluck in disgust. “Do you think it could have something to do with the damage your fingers inflicted on my throat?”
Pluck stared at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“Do you remember sticking your fingers down my throat? Last night?”
“Do you mean. . .our handshake? I presumed that was some strange, ancient Italian gesture of goodwill.”
“I’m Spanish. And you’re an idiot.”
“Well, that isn’t very nice, I must say—the way you seek to deny your own provenance, and culture. Believe me, I was thinking at the time that it was a rather awkward way to express greetings, but I kept it to myself, out of fear of offending your race.”
“You’re a moron.”
“Tsk, tsk—if we weren’t such good friends, I’d almost be tempted to take your remarks amiss. Anyway, I forgive you.” And to illustrate the extent of his forgiveness, he thrust into the coronel’s hands a small, battered kit made of wood.
“What’s this?” The coronel turned it over, and pressed his hand against the grain. “A gift?”
Pluck was looking in a mirror on the wall, pressing up his nose with one thumb and wresting out a nose hair with two fingers, then followed this operation with a wince and a little cry of pain, before casting the discarded fellow into the coronel’s face, where a providential draught caused it to lodge up his friend’s own nostril. “Ha! No. I thought you might use this opportunity to make good on your apology. Since you’re here.”
“What apology?” wheezed the coronel, exhaling embarrassingly like a sneezing, hay fever-afflicted yak and jabbing his (the coronel’s) finger up his (again, the coronel’s) nose with an impetuous viciousness, like a bayonet driven remorselessly into an effigy of his greatest, lifelong foe (in his case, Pluck), a violence which revealed more about the coronel’s true character than perhaps he might have wished, prancing about in a stupid, blind panic owing to the harmless introduction of a tiny foreign element into the xenophobic fatherland of the venerable warrior’s precious proboscis.
“For the damage you did to my nails, my good man. Look.” He shoved his fingertips straight into the coronel’s aged eyes, cutting them and blinding him.
The coronel screamed in extreme disappointment at the progress of their morning conversation thus far.
“What the hell’s the matter?! Shut up, will you?!”
The coronel had collapsed to the floor, pressing his palms against his lids and rolling about like a fucking baby.
Pluck laughed, genially. “You poor old jackass! Whatever are you playing at now?”
“You’ve blinded me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I barely brushed your cornea. I was just trying to show you my nails, after all.”
“I’m bleeding!”
“You are not bleeding, you weepy old fool,” Pluck laughed. “Those are tears, you pathetic crybaby!”
But they were red tears, of the thickness and composition normally associated with blood.
“If I ever see again, I will use my eyes to find a knife with which to cut out your heart!”
“But that’s just the point, don’t you see? If you hadn’t mangled my nails so despicably, they wouldn’t be so jagged and you wouldn’t be blind! Perhaps you should have thought of these likely consequences when you insisted on that stupid old Italian greeting last night, don’t you think?”
The coronel merely wept and shouted the same tired old insults at his friend (although, as unconscious consolation to his agony, the nose hair had achieved an unwished-for liberation, floating down and sailing straight out of this narrative, in an escape of which the coronel himself would have been, had he even noticed, inordinately envious). Pluck, by far the bigger man (I mean emotionally, not with reference to penis size or anything), ignored him, keeping in mind a widely acknowledged truth: that the true course of friendship rarely does run smooth, but often involves the unintentional violation of orifices and, with it, profound, blinding pain.
“There there, my old friend, I forgive you once again,” Pluck consoled him, bending down to pry one of the coronel’s palms from his eye and pressing a nail file from the kit into his fingers. “If you could still see, you’d be aghast at the damage the inside of your throat did to my poor fingernails last night. So try to hold this file straight, and smooth them down a little, will you? Then we can talk about cuticles.”
The coronel, kneeling on the floor, left hand pressed to left eye, tried, through continuous tears and blood, to see enough with his right one to shape Pluck’s nail, with the file in his trembling right hand, to some approximation of its former elegance.
“You’re doing a pitiful job, I must say,” Pluck critiqued. “I only hope Larry Snede, my new valet, will take the job a mite more seriously than you. Do that one again. You’ve fouled it up.”
When Pluck was more or less satisfied, he sighed, offered some more tips for the coronel’s future manicuring career, then threw a tin of shoe polish at the old man’s mouth, and flung a few pairs of shoes, inadvertently boxing him on the ears. Apparently, the clap of sound this boxing made reverberated through the coronel’s ear canals to such an extent that he was rendered temporarily deaf; or at least, that’s as much as Pluck could make out from the scream of curses the old man hurled his way, hands over his ears, dancing about manically and, to Pluck’s mind, comically. Pluck had to laugh.
“What are you on about now, you old donkey?” He sighed, as expression of his extreme tolerance. “Very well. You may wait until all your senses are righted once more before shining the shoes. Just sit down on the bed and relax, can’t you, you poor old jellyfish?”
Meanwhile, to the rhythm of the coronel’s howling and cursing, Pluck sought to loosen up his person, in preparation for what he predicted might be a momentous turning point in the investigation: the interrogation of Glen Stoupes. Pluck performed a series of press-ups (two sets of one rep), running in place (fifteen seconds, moderate pace) and leg lifts (he found lifting his own legs too demanding an exertion, so threw the coronel to the floor and lifted his instead). Pluck then turned to the exercise of his mind: word puzzles, simple algebraic equations and the contemplation of koans (the loud recitation of which Zen enigmas only serving to further confuse the coronel, who at this point was slumped against the wall in a corner, bewailing his fate in teeth-gritted Spanish). All the while, Pluck kept front and centre in his thoughts, as inspiration for the imminent interview, the dual visions of Enid (naked) and Stoupes (clothed, definitely, except for a couple of seconds by accident).
“Now, I’ll need your help for this one,” he appealed of his friend.
“What?”
Pluck threw open the doors of a large wardrobe, smacking the coronel in the face; the audible crack as the wood struck the distinguished soldier’s nose would have seemed to suggest something having broken, but Pluck made a quick appraisal of the door and could detect barely a scratch. He pulled out clothes and blankets from the wardrobe and tossed them about the room; some objects hit the coronel, but he could feel very little by this stage.
“Now, help me up!” he commanded.
“What are you talking about?” asked the coronel.
Pluck sighed, for what else could he do? “Just watch what I’m doing, all right?!” He knelt down, facing away from the wardrobe, and bent his head to the floor—for a hallucinogenic instant, the coronel thought the man might kiss his shoe—then raised, with knee-trembling effort, his feet off the ground behind him. “Help me, for Christ’s sake!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Place my feet on the upper shelf, of course!”
“But why?”
“‘But why’?!” Pluck mocked him. “Cretin! So that I might hang head-downwards, and the blood might flow to my brain, and I might meditate productively before my interview with Mister Stoupes—that’s why!”
With senescent clumsiness, the coronel moved to the wardrobe, until he stood over Pluck’s head, grasped the inspector’s tottering ankles, and fought to raise them to the level of the highest shelf.
“Keep still, damn you!” Pluck seethed from beneath him.
The coronel, in order to extend Pluck’s feet higher, had to lower his grip, hands climbing down Pluck’s legs as they would a ladder, rolling back the inspector’s robe whilst he did so, thereby exposing more and more of the backs of his friend’s naked legs.
“Higher!” shouted Pluck, whose chest was off the floor by now, and who dug his newly trimmed nails into the carpet to hold himself somewhat steady. “I need my feet on the highest shelf, so that my whole body can hang down!”
“I understand, but it may not be possible!” protested the coronel, as he struggled with his hands round Pluck’s knees.
“It’s possible, I assure you! If you’d just believe in yourself, you dumb old goat, you could achieve anything—such is the message I’ve always aimed to spread around the globe; at least for the hearing of those born with sufficient intellect, class status and land-based income to appreciate! Now push me up! Just push me up!”
The coronel did as he’d been bid, and shortly Pluck’s robe rolled down to reveal his utterly naked buttocks to within a hair’s breadth of the Spanish gentleman’s pained, bloody eye.
“Why haven’t you the decency to wear undergarments?!” the soldier demanded to know.
“Why is it any business of yours what I wear over my intimate parts?!” shouted Pluck, outraged at the question. “Though I’m relieved to hear your so-called blindness has been miraculously cured!”
“If this is the cure, I would rather stay blind!”
“Well, if you weren’t stealing perverted glances under my robe, you would never even know, you slimy degenerate!”
“I can hardly avoid seeing, from this vantage, you ape!” retorted the coronel.
“Give me a final thrust up! Up!”
The coronel did so, dropping back down with the effort, his own venerable buttocks dropping onto the back of his friend’s head, Pluck’s feet reaching the coveted top shelf, and the entire wardrobe falling forward and crashing onto the two comrades, who were presently entombed in complete darkness within. Cue panic, profanity and general thrashing-about.
“Get off me, you snake!”
“Shut up, you Italian worm!”
They had not an inch in which to move, nor even a dim shape to perceive. They fought and pushed and accomplished not a whit. After some seconds of effort, the two companions ceased their struggle, lying, twisted up in shirts and each other, in silence, save for their panting.
Naturally, inevitably, Pluck’s thoughts turned to death. The many aspirations he still harboured in his breast, the majority of which concerned fat women but some of which had to do with criminology and making himself a better man, seemed to mock him, if this really was the end. He lay for what could have been an eternity, floating in a waking nightmare of being interred with a strange hybrid creature made up of equal parts Larry, Charles Snede and a decomposed obese lady.
“There’s something alive in here!” the coronel suddenly screamed.
“We’re the both of us alive, you cretin!” Pluck corrected.
“I meant besides us, you fool!”
“Well, how was I to know what you meant? You’re hardly taking pains to make yourself understood.”
“There! I felt it again! On my face!”
“What did you feel on your face? Your nose, perhaps?”
“No! Something slimy, and soft, brushing against it!”
“It’s just your nose!”
“It is not!”
“What is it then?”
“I don’t know!”
“Best to forget it, then, I always say.”
“There! There it is again!”
“No!”
“Yes! Urgh!”
“What’s that? ‘Urgh’?”
“It popped into my mouth, then rushed out again!”
“But what was ‘Urgh’?”
“The thing—the living thing—”
“Yes, yes, I understand that, but I don’t know this Italian word urgh.”
“I was retching, because it went into my mouth!”
“Your nose?”
“No!”
“You tried to swallow your own nose?”
“No!”
“Do you think it might be a rat?”
“A rat! Yes! That must be it!”
“A rat! How horrid! This hotel’s infested with vermin—I knew it!”
“I think you’re right—there it is again!”
“Wait—do you mean this?”
“What?”
“There—did you feel it?”
“Just now?”
“Yes.”
“Yes! I did!”
“Just when I said it?”
“Yes!”
“Let me try it again—there.”
“Yes!”
“You felt it?”
“Yes!”
“Oh, all right. That explains it.”
“What?”
“It’s not your nose.”
“It’s a rat!”
“It’s not a rat.”
“No?”
“No. It’s my penis.”
Cue further thrashing.
“Give me a rat! I want a rat across my face, any day!” the coronel screamed, trying to elbow Pluck in the face but, due to their twistyupedness, only hitting his own knee instead.
“Help! Help! I’m trapped in a tomb with an Italian madman! I don’t want to die! I’m too young to die!” Pluck screamed.
The noise of Pluck’s screaming in that confined space blasted the coronel’s ears once again. “Shut up!” he shouted back, scarcely more softly. “Shut up!”
“No! You shut up!”
“You’re the one who’s ruining my life!”
“I’m ruining your life?!”
“You’re intent on besmirching my honour!”
“Your honour?! You haven’t the simple decency to ask a fellow gentleman before taking his penis into your mouth, and you accuse me of besmirching your honour?!”
Then a noise, from outside.
And a voice: “Who’s in there?”
“It’s me, Pluck! Help me out at once, whoever you are, or I’ll place you instantly under arrest!”
“I thought I heard two voices.”
“No, it’s just me. And, well, Eye-Goo, but mainly me.”
“Here, come over here.” The voice was evidently, Pluck inferred, speaking to somebody else. “We’ll lift up the wardrobe. Ready? One—two—three!”
Their tomb ascended enough to admit a crack of godly light, but the coronel’s simply unprovoked howl of horror frightened their saviours into dropping it back down.
“What the hell’s the matter?!” Pluck demanded.
“My leg!” the coronel wailed. “It’s caught up in the frame, somehow.”
“Is the coronel hurt?” came another voice from outside.
“No, he’s fine!” answered Pluck.
“Does it hurt him when we lift it up?” someone asked.
“No, go ahead, there’s no problem!” Pluck answered.
“Please!” the coronel begged the disembodied voices—angels, for all he knew. “Don’t lift the wardrobe!”
“Great,” sighed Pluck with what he intended as absolutely withering sarcasm, “we’ll just die in here together. We’ll survive for a few days through the exchange of each other’s bodily fluids, then whoever dies first will be eaten by the other, till he, too, kicks off. No problem. Just don’t lift the wardrobe, whatever you do. We certainly wouldn’t want to be free.”
“We’ll spare the coronel’s leg,” someone said from without. “Hang on!”
The two friends lay in the silent darkness for a few minutes. At one point, Pluck muttered: “It’s not like you don’t have another leg. Or like you’re going to be entering a footrace in the near future. And I don’t mean to be rude, but your dancing skills—take it from your recent partner—are simply atrocious.” The coronel, silently sobbing in pain, declined to reply.
The silence was smashed to smithereens at the same time the wardrobe was, with a pickaxe’s point crashing through the wood from above, the hacked fragments torn away by several pairs of hands, the finger-cracks in the handclasp of their darkness widening more and more until the black whistled out and away like a handkerchief into a vacuum or freed bat from a cave, and Pluck and the coronel were yanked up from their tomb into the light of the inspector’s bedroom. Others were there—Mister Drig, Monsieur Lapin-Défunt and a middle-aged man in a wig among them—but the first face Pluck was destined to see upon his deliverance was the ruddy, grinning one belonging to Glen Stoupes.