Chapter Fifty-Two
More interviews were conducted than we have space, or inclination, to describe, all of which yielded no substantial evidence towards the conclusion of the investigation, but all of which would have been seen to contain incidents of thoroughly gratifying hilarity, had the reader only been present. On the other hand, I’m certain that the reader is, in some chamber of his or her psyche, grateful for this uncharacteristic reticence on the narrator’s part, as the book is, let’s be honest, getting on a bit. So we’ll pass stoically over the American cowboy, the Belgian swindler, the Siamese hermaphrodite and the Russian pretender to the throne; but I feel I would be remiss in neglecting to include one particular scene, which concerns one of the most beloved of our characters, as detailed below.
Of an afternoon, not long after the masquerade which all the guests, in unspoken agreement, tried to exile from their minds, Pluck was whistling into the reading room when he spotted the coronel, dozing in an armchair, from behind. What did our indomitable protagonist do but slap the fellow heartily on the back and greet him volubly, hail-fellow-well-met and all that, causing the old man to wake and attempt, thin-bonedly, to look over his shoulder, with an expression on his martial visage as if a bird had shat on him.
“May I join you?” Pluck asked, as a formality, of his friend, squeezing down beside him in the armchair while speaking.
“Leave me!” the old man begged.
Pluck roared at his friend’s joke. “What are you doing in the reading room, you old idiot? You know you’ve never picked up a book in your life!”
The coronel’s brittle fingers fumbled in his jacket pocket, but it was difficult to manoeuvre with Pluck pressed stiflingly against him.
“What have you got there, you silly fool?” laughed Pluck. “Some sordid ‘ethnographic’ photograph, I surmise?”
The coronel found his knife and jammed it between Pluck’s ribs. Pluck cried out, like a woman. The coronel, hissing through gritted teeth, twisted the handle. Pluck stood up, and pushed the coronel to the floor.
“You clumsy old fool!” Pluck screamed. “Look what you’ve done! Didn’t your mother ever warn you to be careful with knives?! You hand somebody a knife handle-side out!”
From the floor, the coronel stared up at what he’d done—and something shifted, in his eyes. It was as if he was not looking at Pluck, at that moment, but, by gazing upon what he’d wrought, the effect of his action, he was gazing upon himself—the deed defining the doer—and he saw himself a monster.
“Forgive me!” he cried, and tried to get to his feet. “I am an ogre!”
“You’re a bloody idiot, is what you are,” Pluck agreed, and, holding his breath, pulled out the knife in a quick, clean go and threw it to the floor.
“Are you all right?” asked the coronel, rising, with the help of the armchair and a floor lamp.
“Yes, I’m all right, you stupid fool! I’ve been a detective for the better part of twenty years, I’ll have you know; this isn’t the first time I’ve been stabbed by some well-meaning but blundering cretin like yourself. Here, give me that.”
“Give you what?”
Pluck grabbed hold of the coronel’s dress shirt, which peeked out from between the flanks of his uniform, and tore off a strip, with which he set to sopping up the blood spilling from his side. “I expect the management will increase your bill by the value of this armchair you’ve stained. Assuming that all members of the management haven’t been sent before a firing squad as accessories to murder by that point, of course.”
The coronel, overcome with rage at himself, dragged his feet across the carpet, his fingers outstretched before him, shaking pathetically. His mouth hung open, and drool was to be seen.
“You look awful, my friend,” sighed Pluck. “Sit down, why don’t you, and I’ll call for someone to see to you.”
But the coronel did not sit down; rather, when he reached his friend, he tried to take the rumpled strip of cloth out of Pluck’s hand and sop up the blood himself, but he was careless and, due to the tears gushing down his face, inept.
“Oh, you’re just making it worse, you moron!” shouted Pluck. “Here, give it here.”
The coronel embraced the inspector, and wept onto his chest.
“I’m sorry!” he sobbed. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done!”
“Don’t make a scene! You’re making a fool out of yourself! A fool enacting a fool, in some nightmarish infinite regress of roles!”
By this time, alerted by the screams and tears, some staff and other guests wandered in—not with undue haste, as both screaming and crying had been heard almost every hour of this holiday—to observe and assist.
The coronel, his arms still round Pluck’s waist, dropped to his knees—two soft cracks could be heard as each knee hit the rug—lay his cheek against Pluck’s groin, and, before these witnesses, weepily proclaimed: “I love you! I love you! I denied it, to myself, I lied to myself, because it was not meet for a soldier—but I love you, and I’ve only come to see it when I hurt you!”
Pluck, standing in an awkward position, couldn’t properly right himself, because of the presence of his best friend clutching him so passionately. Truth told, he was getting a little bored with declarations of love. He looked down at this man: the subtle glow from the fire invested him with a kind of ethereality, as if his time for this world was but momentary, and would flicker out, with the flame, before he knew it.
As Enid and Bartoff were among those present, Pluck saw no reason why this scene should not function in the role of interview. In that frame of mind, he placed two fingers upon the thin white dandruff-dappled hair which bestrew the coronel’s bowed head and pronounced: “I find you—innocent.”