Chapter Sixty
Pluck dressed in front of his mirror. He brushed his coat, then combed his hair. His left arm was numb from the bullet it still enwombed, and he had difficulty getting on his coat. He could really use a helpmeet, he reflected. Someone of ample bulk, absent sexual scruples or standards, possessing very low expectations as regards her consort’s penis size, and, most of all, boasting a kind, loving, selfless, self-abasing heart.
He stared at his own image in the glass. He looked, he determined, as if assessing a suspect in the interviewee’s chair instead of himself, an exhausted mess. A rest—a long rest was what he needed. Perhaps when he returned home, when this holiday was through, he might finally unearth for himself a small moment of peace, somewhere, somehow.
And if this should be his last day on Earth?, he wondered. What kind of an end is this? All those things he dreamt, when he was young. . .
He took out his photo album for what might be the last time. He knew them all, intimately; every grain of every image, every frond of every plant, every crease in every belly fold, every suety sag of every buttock, every ironical tint in a smile. What if he should never find that beach? Never enjoy the pleasures of those ladies’ flesh?
He must not satisfy himself bodily, this morning. He must conserve his virility for the defence of his life, so that he might seek those pleasures another day. Not merely between the sperm-splotched pages of his album, but in reality—reality—whatever, he mused, that might discover itself to be.
Bartoff knocked and came in.
“You will smash her!” Bartoff insisted. “I have every confidence you will vindicate not only your own honour, but that of our sex!”
“What sex? You and I have never had sex.”
“I mean man!”
“Which man?”
“Our gender, Inspector!”
“Ah! Yes. What about it?”
“That you shall defend the dignity of man!”
“Yes! The dignity of man!”
“The dignity of man!”
“Dignity of man!”
They drank to the dignity of man.
Bartoff accompanied Pluck on his long walk down the corridor. As they entered the lobby, Missus Drig, with a relieved smile of having done her duty, rushed up to them. “Inspector! I have completed me list.”
He took it and glanced it over: there it was—a list of all the places she could think of where she hadn’t been on the night of the murder, grouped by continent, country, county, town, down to individual addresses she could recall. He nodded with appreciation.
“A formidable, and exacting, accomplishment, Missus Drig. I can clear you from suspicion with the clearest of consciences. Thank you.”
She curtsied, and they stepped forward, only to now be accosted by Missus Drig’s daughter Betsy.
“Inspector! Oh, Inspector!”
Pluck stopped. “What is it, child?”
“I’ve made my list, of all the places my brother Bo wasn’t on the third of October, three years ago, aside from the Mind of God! I’ve got it here!”
He took it, and looked it over. It was similar to her mother’s list, but haphazard, with a plethora of misspellings and geographical anomalies, but he forgave her everything.
He squatted down to her level. “You are a wonderful child, do you know that?”
“No, I. . .”
A tear came to his eye. “Thank you. Now please, go to your room and find some doll to play with. What is to come is not for your young eyes.” He embraced her. “I wish you a long and happy life, free from the sordid concerns of the world through which I’ve had the regrettable misfortune to move in mine.” And he rose once more, to go off with Bartoff, for there was nothing more to be said.
The hotel staff, in consultation with Frau Hühnerbeinstein, had managed to burrow a tunnel outside, through the snow, and up to the top of a solidly packed drift. Through this tunnel, now, Pluck and Bartoff crawled, arriving on top of the snow, on a vast sea of white, under a colourless sky, level with the roof of the hotel.
The air was biting but invigorating. The guests and staff were arranged to observe the duel. Out along the field of snow, besides the roof, only treetops poking through, like chopped broccoli tops, broke the horizontality. The audience was a sober, silent lot, in their overcoats. They looked on Pluck as on a villain in a pantomime, with this the premiere performance, following the earlier dress rehearsal.
“I’d like to protest,” began Pluck, before realising that his voice could not carry in that immense open space; it had disintegrated like sprinkled pollen. “I’d like to protest,” he shouted, although it only came across to his listeners like a whiny peep, “at the idea of fighting a woman in a duel! It is not honourable, it is not civilised, and it is not dignified!”
Sri Gangakanta, again acting in the capacity of referee, shook his head. “Those chivalric notions hold no purchase here. We are outside civilisation, outside law; the definitions of honour over which you and your opponent will battle are definitions exclusive to yourselves. We are only here to watch, and make sure you behave in accordance with universally agreed protocols of fairness—if, indeed, such a thing could be said to exist.”
At that moment, Frau Hühnerbeinstein, dressed in Wagnerian Viking gear, appeared from out of the tunnel, followed by her second, Madame Lapin-Défunt. They approached Sri Gangakanta, Pluck and Bartoff, the group isolated by a large space from the spectators.
“Now is the time to negotiate a peaceful resolution to this argument,” began Sri Gangakanta.
“No,” said Gilda, stonily, staring at Pluck without emotion. “Give me the sword.”
Sri Gangakanta opened a long case. Frau Hühnerbeinstein took one blade. Pluck took the other; he tried a few practice swings, and accidentally cut into his left arm. He screamed, but no one was moved to assist. He looked into the audience for some sliver of sympathy, but found none. This time, Enid was not on hand to cheer him, beg him to refrain or remind him just how much life is to be relished; she was, instead, at that moment crying into her counterpane, cursing Cupid for his really rather inconvenient myopia.
Pluck turned to face his antagonist. Frau Hühnerbeinstein stared at him, and he at her, while Sri Gangakanta recited some rules to which neither of them was listening. In Gilda’s eyes, Pluck saw the cumulative resentment stockpiled by her sex since Eve; while she, looking unrewardingly deep into the dead black cesspools of his eyes, saw nothing worth the noting.
The duel began. Frau Hühnerbeinstein slashed at him, tearing a gash through his coat and into his chest. He screamed. She stabbed his shoulder, then his stomach. He collapsed to the ground. She hacked at his back, the backs of his legs, and chopped off his left foot. His shrieking ceased when he blacked out.