Chapter Sixty-One
He awoke in a dark room. A thin layering of light spilled in from under the door. He was lying on the floor, in a pool, or pools, of blood; presumably, he calculated, his own. He looked down at his bloody clothes, dim in the murk. He felt a mixture of intense pain over parts of his body with an overlathering of numbness. He looked down his leg, which extended out of the light. Something was amiss, there, he vaguely recalled. He shifted his legs about, until one foot was illumined. His left one, he saw, was gone. Well, he had never intended to become a professional dancer, anyway, he muttered in a huff, before proceeding to work out what he would do with the savings he would make from henceforth purchasing only one shoe at a time.
There was a scratching, at the door. Had she come to finish him off? Or was it Enid, come to beg forgiveness?
“Come in,” he cracked from his unlubricated throat. No one entered; the scratching stopped, for a moment, then resumed.
Pluck dragged himself over to the door, reached up for the handle, hit his head on it, fell back down, then, after more struggling, managed to get onto his knees, grab the doorknob, turn it, and pull open the door.
A torrent of light broke over him and Sam the dog came pattering in. He barked and licked his master’s friend’s hand.
“Get away from me, you little shit!” he screamed, and moved to kick him, forgetting that the foot he’d had in mind to use was no longer present; as he collapsed once more to the floor, the stump of his shin passed by the dog, who yelped, as if in mockery. Pluck was going to take no more of that. He seized the mutt around his neck, and squeezed.
The door flew wide open and Bartoff appeared. “Sam!”
Pluck let the dog go and immediately shouted, “He tried to kill me! It’s the murderer! He killed Blip Williams!”
Bartoff, entirely still, stared at Pluck: in his eyes came the transformation of one who has witnessed the death of his god.
What happened next proceeded in a blur: the corridor was filled with all the guests and staff, manhandling Pluck, shoving him along; soon he was tied to a chair on the stage in the hotel theatre, with Monsieur Lapin-Défunt, Mister Stoupes, Bartoff and others making fiery speeches to incensed spectators, none of which he could hear. His head was filled with a lullaby of some sort, which he could not recognise but felt like he’d heard long ago. Many fingers pointed at him, many faces wept and raged, much spit was spat. He surmised, with the talent that had made him such a redoubtable detective, that the general mood in the room was one of hostility towards himself. It did not seem to be just about the dog, but about various things, too numerous to count, too trivial to attend to; he preferred to listen to the music.
Suddenly, there was silence. Every face was turned toward his. Something had been said, which he had not quite caught. It was said again:
“How do you plead?”
He was practically blinded by lights, which were disproportionate in relation to the number of lamps, and were coming from who knew where.
“How do you plead?”
He gulped the spit he did not have, and whispered: “. . .You are all guilty.”
He was raised—he felt certain he’d grown wings, or was being carried by those who had—and a rope placed round his neck. The sinews in his throat felt like they were being twisted by a sailor into a knot, and the bones like they were being crushed in a giant, supernatural fist. His remaining foot flapped about in the air, freed from the floor. His arms, he just now realised, were tied behind his back.
A long stick appeared (uncircumcised). It was passed from person to person, each taking a nice whack at the dangling inspector:
Glen Stoupes, face with smug expression of American righteousness, whacked Pluck across the face;
Danny Drig, the eldest son, broke a rib;
Monsieur Lapin-Défunt clenched his teeth as he smacked Pluck, again and again, about his legs, chest and neck;
Rosella glared fiery-eyed, fingers between her legs, as she orgasmically thumped him in the face, smashing his nose, its blood spurting down upon her lusting tongue;
Genevra Bergamaschi waited till he spun on his rope, then repeatedly thrust the stick up the back of his trousers, cracking open his sphincter;
Charles Bartoff smacked him about the mouth with the stick until his jaw was smashed and his teeth fragmented about the floor;
Aloysius Delphi stabbed him in the stomach until he couldn’t breathe;
The Scottish horsebreeder smacked him about the flanks;
A porter beat him about the ears, bursting a drum;
Herra Kivi Brotherus, with savagery, upon the neck;
A sweaty financier, with bourgeois aplomb, cracked open his knuckles;
Alan Sanns, exhaustedly, could barely lift the stick to reach his calves;
Modeste Cranat slapped him about the buttocks, screaming and laughing all the while;
Annette Godefroi stabbed him viciously in the groin, smashing apart first one, then the other, testicle;
Mifkin broke both his arms;
Herr Voot cracked the bones about his eye sockets;
Curtis Vacaresteanu broke both his knees;
Sri Gangakanta passed, handing the stick to Madame Tautphoeus, who rammed it into Pluck’s mouth, breaking through his palate and the base of his skull;
Deirdre Laoghaire struck him savagely, all over, before finding a cleaver and sawing off his other foot;
At which point Coronel Feosalma hobbled in, irate at the scene, and grabbed the stick, which he swung at the assembled, trying to shoo them off, only to have it wrestled from his hands, and he was shoved aside, knocked to the floor.
Now came a final whacking, all about Pluck’s body; his bloody, dislodged corneas lent his vision an impenetrable blurriness, and through the haze, Pluck swore it was Charles Snede who now attacked him; but as the fog cleared for a moment, he saw it was really Poor Larry who was bringing the stick crashing up at his head, over and over, with a merciless, clear-sighted savagery.
In the spaces between the covetous blackness which pulsed over and off of him, Pluck looked away from the braying faces and off to the side, in a corner of the stage, where Enid stood, hugging herself, crying silently, though refusing to help. Enid; then blackness; Enid; then blackness, like the shadow of a cloud passing over a lily in a pond.
Then the rope snapped, Pluck fell to the floor, and the stick, and kicks, and fists, rained down upon him, refreshingly, as upon a fresh-faced bud just ready to peep up from the forest floor. The cloud drifted forward; the lily was lost; the bud opened; and the pain ceased.
Pluck was dead.