Chapter Fifty-Nine
When Pluck awoke, he found his shirt in shreds all about him, a pair of scissors nearby. He realised his nudity, and hastily covered his nipples with his forearms. Sitting up, he saw Frau Hühnerbeinstein dozing on the settee. He couldn’t remember what had happened. From a pessimistic streak he’d acquired through years of investigation of the darkest depths of human depravity, he feared the worst.
“Frau Hühnerbeinstein! Wake up!” He shook her, by the thigh, with some alarm.
“What is it?” Her eyes popped open. She looked around her.
“Are you pregnant?” he asked.
“What?!” She tried to gather her bearings, but, if she’d had any to begin with, they were surely scattered over the floor, under furniture, like marbles.
“Because if so, we should wed immediately. I’ll want to call him ‘Curtis’, of course, after me; or, depending on your point of view, after that rascally porter about whom I’d rather not just now speak. I shall raise him to be a detective. Pluck Junior, I mean—not the porter. The porter can go to Hell, quite frankly, and the sooner, the better—so say I. Now, I know what you’re thinking, Gilda, but don’t worry: if, someday, we are additionally blessed with a little girl, you are perfectly entitled to call her ‘Gilda’ and train her for a career on the stage. I couldn’t care less about that end of things, the female end, you understand; and while Curtis Junior and I are out saving the world from evildoers, you and Gilda are free to tread the boards and choke on the sawdust of the finest venues on the operatic circuit—so long as you two can support yourselves financially in your artistic adventures, I should have thought it would go without saying.”
“What are you talking about?” she finally asked.
“Didn’t we fuck last night?” he asked.
“Certainly not.”
“Perhaps I misspoke. Didn’t we indulge in tender, mutually respectful lovemaking last night?”
“We didn’t do that either.”
“Oh. . . .Could we do it now?”
“No.”
“To which one?”
“To both.”
“Oh.” His feelings were hurt; he began to cry.
“Don’t be a child,” she scoffed.
“What do you mean?” he sobbed.
“My head hurts.”
“My heart hurts!” he wailed. “Please! Will you at least suck my penis?”
“You’re disgusting.” She got up and went to the door.
“Murderess!” he screamed. He stood up, readjusted his arms so he could cover both his nipples with his left, wounded one and extend a finger from the hand of his right, robust one to point straight at her nose. “You murdered Larry!”
There were noises from outside the door.
“Shut up!” she hissed.
“I will not!” he screamed. He leapt up and opened the door: Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, Mister Drig, Signora Bergamaschi, Rosella, Monsieur Bartoff, Aloysius, and several others were gathered outside. “Ladies and gentlemen, enter! But promise not to ogle my exposed nipples.”
The crowd came in. Frau Hühnerbeinstein stood with a dignified bearing, accustomed as she was to the leers of an audience.
“I wish to formally accuse Frau Hühnerbeinstein of the murder of all the victims I enumerated before. The rest of you are clearly innocent, while this woman is clearly guilty.”
“What is the proof?” asked Signora Bergamaschi.
“Pardon?”
“What is the evidence?” Missus Drig asked.
“Excellent question,” Pluck admitted. “A very excellent question indeed.”
There was silence for some time.
“Are you going to answer the excellent question?” It was Enid—she’d come in too.
Pluck glared at her. “And which ‘excellent’ question would that be, exactly—I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“My name is Enid Trojczakowski, and the question in question is ‘what is the proof of Frau Hühnerbeinstein’s guilt’.”
“That didn’t sound like a question—I didn’t hear any question mark.”
“What is the proof of Frau Hühnerbeinstein’s guilt?” Enid exaggeratedly raised the pitch of the last word so as to allow no ambiguity over which class of sentence it was.
Pluck nodded. “I acknowledge the interrogative nature of that sentence,” he admitted.
“Very good,” said Enid. “Then please answer it.”
“Answer what?”
“The question, you cretin,” added Monsieur Lapin-Défunt.
“Shut up, you pig, or I’ll accuse you too,” Pluck muttered to him out of the side of his mouth.
“What proof do you have of Frau Hühnerbeinstein’s guilt?” Enid repeated.
“You’ve already asked me that. I fail to see why you keep on repeating the same question, over and over and over and over—I’m sorry, I’ve gone and forgotten your name again.”
“My name is not the issue here. The issue is whether you are a real inspector, who goes about his business by accumulating evidence before making accusations of murder, or whether you are an imposter, who has made a farce of this investigation and gone about ruining the lives of nearly every person in this hotel.”
“I didn’t hear a question there,” Pluck sniffed, scrutinising a crack in the ceiling.
Enid enunciated each word meticulously: “What proof do you have that Frau Hühnerbeinstein is a murderess?”
Pluck looked at his accusers, defiant to the last. “And by ‘Frau Hühnerbeinstein’, I suppose you mean this lady here?” He pointed at Monsieur Lapin-Défunt.
“I do not. I refer to the lady whose name that is.”
“So by ‘Frau Hühnerbeinstein’, you mean, in reality, Frau Hühnerbeinstein.”
“I do.”
“Hm. Very good.”
“And the answer?”
“Pardon?”
“What is the answer to my question?”
“Which question was that?”
The audience groaned, and the rumblings of a new revolt could be felt.
“What proof do you have that Frau Hühnerbeinstein is a murderess?”
“This Frau Hühnerbeinstein? This one, here?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t hear a question there.”
“That’s because I didn’t put one; I merely confirmed that you were correct concerning the identity of the person I nominated in the question I did put.”
“Which was?”
“What proof do you have that Frau Hühnerbeinstein is a murderess?”
“But you’ve already asked that!” Pluck exclaimed, in exasperation. “How many times must you bore us with the same damn question?!”
“Tell me what proof you have against me, right now, or I shall call you a ‘villain’ and make you pay for all the wrongs you have inflicted on us over this holiday.” The words—and strong words they were, too—came courtesy of the oft-discussed Frau Hühnerbeinstein.
Pluck whirled around. “Are you speaking to me, madame?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Because, I thought, perhaps you might have been speaking to Miss Trojczakowski.”
“No.”
“I can’t quite remember her name, but I think it was something like that.”
“No. I was speaking to you.”
“Yes, of course.” He chuckled, a little. “You must forgive me, madame; but sometimes I have a little difficulty in remembering people’s names. Faces—no problem. Dates, events—I am an expert, I’m pleased to say, with no false modesty. But names. . .”
“Cease the inane details and tell me the grounds for your accusation this instant, or you shall pay,” Frau Hühnerbeinstein said slowly and softly.
Pluck turned to Enid. “You heard her, Miss Trojczakowski: offer your proof, or keep quiet.”
“I was speaking to you, Inspector Pluck,” Frau Hühnerbeinstein continued calmly. “I was looking at you, and I was speaking to you.”
“Yes, but, you must admit, Frau Hühnerbeinstein, that people often do speak to people at whom they are not at that moment looking. If I were to fill my pipe, for instance, while speaking to you—eyeing the essential details of tamping the tobacco, or what have you, so that it should be properly done, and not spill onto the floor and make yet another mess for the attention of Mademoiselle Godefroi; or, in prayer, when one begs help of, let’s say, Christ, without his being physically present in the room, and eye-to-eye discourse being, therefore, something of a difficulty—”
“Inspector Pluck!” Frau Hühnerbeinstein interrupted him. “What proof have you against me?”
Pluck swept the floor with the sole of his shoe, and watched himself do it; as if the tobacco spillage he’d imagined in his example had magically materialised, right there, in that room, in the presence of all those witnesses. “. . .I hardly think you need interrupt me so imperiously, madame. I had several more examples I’d wished to submit.”
Frau Hühnerbeinstein walked to him; he backed away, emitting a girlish shriek, but she grabbed him under his chin and forced him to look her in the eye; her thumb and forefinger crushing his mouth into a pucker, he for an instant thought she meant to kiss him, and stuck out his tongue in anticipation, but was disappointed to discover that she merely wished him to acknowledge without excuse that she was addressing him. “What proof have you against me?”
“All right!” He knocked her arm away, stumbled back a few steps, into Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, and spat on the rug. “All right! You want to know the proof? I’ll tell you, and before these good people! The proof is that you insultingly refused to take my penis into your mouth, not out of any aesthetic reproof, of which there clearly could be none, but out of fear that the erotic arousal which would necessarily ensue would disarm you of your scruples and lead to your confession—of murder.”
She, and the rest of his auditors, stood aghast at what was, even for him, a new low.
“Now,” he continued, feeling that he’d reclaimed control of the scene and won the audience to his side, “if you wish to prove, once and for all, that you are innocent of the charge, you will agree, before these witnesses, to become my wife.”
All eyes turned to Frau Hühnerbeinstein. Her reaction to his proposal was most anticipated.
She took a deep breath; her bosom rose, like two massive goitres which had been sprinkled with fairy dust; and, turning to her side, throwing him an enigmatical glance, she began to slowly unwrap her long left glove down her arm.
“Yes-s-s-s-s-s-s!” he hissed. As more and more of her arm became exposed, he fumbled in his trousers for his penis, the idea suddenly occurring to him that the intensity of the scene would be heightened if he were able to manipulate himself for bodily pleasure. The response of the onlookers, as can be readily imagined, ranged variously across the spectrum of disgust.
The glove off, Pluck naturally expected her to progress to her other glove, then her gown, then her underthings, then his, culminating in a public display of love. Instead, she took the divested glove in her other hand and used it to slap him across the face. “I demand satisfaction!” she roared in glorious contralto. “Tomorrow, at dawn.”