Chapter Thirty-Eight
Pluck couldn’t sleep. Although he’d as much as solved the case, and was awaiting the conclusion of the interview process before making his public denunciations, there were still a couple of niggling details which refused to slot into his theory.
He lit his bedside candle, stroked his rabbit and opened up his album of photographic portraits. Ah, one of his favourites: a dark-haired lady, amply endowed across all sectors of her person, walking a dog along a fenced-off pond in a well-lit, sylvan scene, the lady in question being, for unexplained artistic reasons, bereft of clothes. The lady smiled, a little dubiously, at the viewer. She was not at all comfortable with the aesthetic necessity of exposing her pudendum, Pluck decided, having subjected the image to his peerless analytical powers. There it was: the façade of a smile upon her lips, but the death of innocence, caught in the unforgiving flash of the camera lamp, in her eyes.
He found his magnifying glass and studied the picture in detail, lingering over armpit hair, creases circling the navel, nipple wrinkles, and toenails in need of a trim. All the while, his left hand stroked, and stroked true. His gaze had happened to fall, of all places, on the unpromising lumps of her knee, when all thought ceased, mystical angel-lamps flashed across the vault of his cranium, and his brain shut down, leaving the cave of his skull cold, and dark, and hushed in hesitant peace.
He awoke some time later, coughed, and banished the squeaky condemnations spouted by some interrogating spirit to a distant cupboard of his brain. Post-coitally, now, for want of anything better, he took another look at the lady’s dog. A silly little thing. Dark and light in splotches, avoiding the camera; it would never be a celebrity of note, Pluck judged, although he was forced to admire its relative indifference to its state of undress, in contrast with its master’s manifest shame. He peered closer. It actually looked a little like Sam. He peered still closer; his nose pressed sensually against the gelatin. It was Sam. Or, should he say: “Millicent”. Or her ancestor. Which meant. . . Pluck’s lightning-fast cogitation put two and two together, made twenty-two, dismissed the result and began again, and, after forty-odd minutes of brow-knitting, arrived at the inevitable conclusion that the hussy in the photograph was none other than the distinguished Madame Tautphoeus, in younger and, it would seem, more dishonourable days.
There was nothing to be done but to rush at once to her room and seek a brutal confrontation. Halfway there, he gleaned from the reaction of a night porter that he’d forgotten to dress himself; he returned to his room, threw on his robe, promising himself to tie it on the way, and finally arrived at the door. Justice waiting for no man or woman, he did not bother to knock, but let himself in with the master key he’d browbeaten Poor Larry into lending him. He walked into the bedroom, lit a lamp, opened the album to the incriminating page and shouted: “Wake up and behold thy wickedness, woman! I submit that the trollop in this picture is you!”
The figure in the bed rolled over; terrified eye-whites shone.
“Eye-Goo!” Pluck uttered in disbelief. “What are you doing in Madame’s room?! What have you done with her?! Produce her this instant!”
The coronel squinted drowsily at the photograph which was still thrust before him. “That looks nothing like me!” he protested.
Pluck ripped off the blankets and searched the bed for Madame Tautphoeus; he found nothing. While he was thus engaged, the coronel withdrew a knife from under his pillow and held it to Pluck’s nose.
“Get out of my room or I’ll kill you,” he declared without preamble.
“Don’t be absurd,” laughed Pluck. “Firstly, this is Madame’s room—not yours. Secondly,”—here he counted on his fingers, to ensure he had not made one of the basic arithmetical errors to which he was prone—“you’re my best friend. Thirdly. . .” They both waited for a third reason why Pluck should not be killed; after several long minutes, Pluck finally came up with: “Well, it’s the law of the land, you know.”
The coronel jabbed his knife at Pluck’s nose in response. Escaping with merely a prick (by which I mean, “a tiny cut on the nose”; not, “a penis”), Pluck darted from the room, his precious album under his arm.
As he bolted down the corridor, screaming in mortal terror, a door opened: it was Madame Tautphoeus, cinching her robe-strap round her waist, seeing what was the commotion.
“Madame! Quick, let me in!” Without waiting for any sign of accord, Pluck burst into her room and locked the door behind him. He panted, eyes closed, hugging his album. “Thank you, madame. It so happens that I have just bested Coronel Feosalma in single combat over the insult to your person he rendered by ejecting you from your room. Now, if—by way of thanks—you would kindly be so good as to explain this!” He flung open his eyes and the album at once, only to find he had been speaking to no one.
A knock on the door—who could it be?
“Who’s there?” he asked through the door, all sorts of dreadful possibilities invading his imagination.
“Madame Tautphoeus,” came the reply. “You’ve locked me out of my room.”
He laughed. “But that’s absurd! Tell me, exactly when did I do a thing like that?”
“Only moments ago,” came the answer through the wood.
“Really?” He found the charge extraordinary. “Then prove it.”
“Open the door and see.”
Pluck considered. He could find no obvious objection to the proposal, and so unlocked and opened the door, to find Madame where she’d claimed to be.
“Madame! Quick! Into my room!” He grabbed her arm and wrenched her inside. “There’s at least one madman on the loose!” He shut and locked the door.
“I could not agree more,” she sighed, readjusting her robe from his manhandling. “Now what is the latest crisis which necessitated the disturbance of my rest?”
“Nothing, madame, nothing save the revelation of your ancient indignities!”
“By which you mean what, exactly, pray tell?”
“By which I mean the unveiling of this cloak of genteel decency under which you’ve been masquerading in evasion of your former whoredom—madame!”
That esteemed gentlewoman was forced to demand, unrhetorically: “How dare you!”
“And I retort, how dare you, woman!” And with that, he threw open the album to the page in question.
“What’s that? What have you got there? What are you looking at?”
Baffled by madame’s queries, Pluck looked down, to discover that he had opened the album to face himself, with its untitled covers facing her. With a deft manoeuvre or two, he twisted one arm under the other, so as to more properly display to his practically vanquished opponent the page he had found so distasteful, but somehow got tangled up and ended up locking his arms around each other, the album tumbling to the floor.
“One moment, if you please, madame!” He disengaged his arms and stooped to pick up the album, which he did, and then, this done, he opened it up, flipped through some pages, found the one he’d been intent on showing her, and finally, carefully, turned it around so that it should be exposed to her view.
“What is that? A photograph?”
“Your sight is keen, madame.”
“She’s not wearing any clothes.”
“Of course she isn’t; she is a dog, madame.”
“I refer to the woman, Inspector.”
“The what?”
“The woman. The person. The human being, who has been photographed holding the lead of the dog.”
“What of her?”
“She’s not wearing any clothes.”
“You mean the woman?”
“I do. You understand my meaning perfectly, Inspector.”
“You are correct, madame: neither the dog nor the woman is pictured in clothes.”
“It is disgusting; revolting.”
“I agree.”
“I know that park and that patch very well, and it is absolutely off-limits to dogs!”
“And are you disgusted by the woman’s failure to have dressed herself before leaving her home?”
“It was awfully careless of her, anyway.”
“Take a close look at the dog, madame.”
“Yes? What of it?”
“Does anything about it seem familiar?”
“You’re not suggesting—?”
“I am.”
“Inspector, you’re not suggesting—?”
“Indeed I am.”
“This dog is the murderer?!”
“Yes, madame, that is correct: this dog is the—. . .no, no, you don’t comprehend me at all.”
“Then what is it? Why have you barged into my room in the middle of the night and shown me a pornographic photograph of a woman and her dog, if it has not something to do with the case under investigation?”
“Look once again at the dog, if you’ll humour me one last time, madame, and I think all will become clear.”
She did as she was bid.
“. . .It looks rather like Millicent.”
“It does.”
“Down to the splotches and the adorable way she has of holding herself.”
“Agreed. And do you notice anything about the lady?”
“You mean the lady?”
“That is what I mean, madame.”
She looked closely.
“. . .She is beautiful.”
“Agreed.”
“She has a well-moulded face. With a poignant intimation of lost youth about her eyes. And she is rather large, about the body—”
“Indeed.”
“But it becomes her. Her breasts. . .are shaped with an exquisite delicacy. . .perfectly pitched, as if miraculously levitating, by the grace of the Almighty, between gravity’s will and Heaven’s savour. . .”
“You’ve described them magnificently, madame!”
“And her hips. . .devised wide, for childbirth. . .”
“Yes.”
“Quintuplets, one might say. With creamy columns of flesh descending to the feet—I refer to her legs—soft and rich with taut nerves which would, if clasped in the manly grip of a lover, irradiate waves of pleasure throughout her person.”
“Yes!”
“And as for her maidenhead—”
“Yes?”
“Her deep cleft peeks out, with a bit of a wink at us, through the clump of weeds as if inviting the viewer to investigate the greatest, cosmic, mystery at the centre of us all. . !”
For the second time that evening, Pluck achieved orgasm, though without recourse to the use of his, or for that matter anybody else’s, hands. When it was over, his head bowed, he closed his eyes, and was silent.
“. . .And yes, Inspector, if you are intent on knowing it: I am the lady in the photograph. Or rather, I was. . .several lifetimes ago.”
Still catching his breath, Pluck muttered: “You are a slattern and a whore, madame.”
“I haven’t the decency to disagree, monsieur. Although, since you’ve found me out, will you allow me one, small, request?”
“Of course, madame; honour demands it.”
“Would you terribly mind closing your robe?”
Pluck had forgotten to do so, he now realised; he placed the album on the floor, wiped the milk of his manhood off the book, off his belly, off Madame Tautphoeus’s gown, then off his hands onto the lime-green wallpaper nearby, and, finally, closed his robe.
By this time, the dignified lady had sunk into a chair and wept. Pluck smouldered, despising himself.
“I know I am ugly, madame; even revolting. But one cannot choose the appearance of one’s naked person so easily, you must know.”
“It’s not that,” she sniffled.
“I have made you cry in revulsion at the appearance of my naked self.”
“No, no, it’s not that.” She found a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. “It’s that damned dog.”
“The dog, madame?”
“I shed my flesh, I changed my hair, I gained wrinkles and veins; I altered every aspect of my appearance through these years, but I never dreamt I’d be found out by my dog.”
“Madame. . .as head of the investigating committee. . .all I can tell you is that: I will cherish your secret to my grave.”
She looked at him with an appreciation he’d never thought he’d see in her. She rose, he wiped away his own tear, and they shared an ineffably transcendent hug.