Chapter Sixteen
The next morning, which followed the night—because, whether we like it or not, that’s the way these things work; unless, if you really prefer looking at it another way, it could be said that night follows day—Mifkin was stood behind the counter in the lobby, going over some accounts with another member of staff. Or rather, his eyes traced the elegantly scripted numerals, curvaceously erotic, drawn by someone, he could divine, with an active procreative impulse, each swish a brush of fingers along a thigh, each dot a forceful penetration into the maidenhood of the page, each loop a tongue around a nipple, until the entry tapered to the singularity of orgasm—but Mifkin’s mind soon tired of these things, and he began to contemplate if it would really be so bad if he were to impale himself with the pen he held between two fingers. Would anybody care? Would anyone mourn him? He knew the answer, and it was not “Of course, yes, yes they would!”
His attention was torn from these thoughts by a commotion at the top of the stairs.
“Somebody!”
“Help!”
“There’s been a scream!”
“From Inspector Pluck’s room!”
“Hurry!”
Etcetera, etcetera.
Grabbing the arm of the porter beside him (he couldn’t resist a fleeting, appreciative squeeze of the bicep), Mifkin led his troupe up the stairs. Indeed, outside the inspector’s room, a group of concerned guests was milling.
Kivi Brotherus approached him. “Monsieur Mifkin—I wonder if you could settle an argument between Mister Philip La Paiva and myself on the subject of hockey.”
Mifkin pushed past him. “What’s happened?” he asked of the group.
“A scream,” said Stoupes. “Coming from the inspector’s room.”
Gilda Hühnerbeinstein looked alarmed. “You don’t think. . .?”
“Coronel Feosalma has been in the habit of occupying the late inspector’s room,” said Gangakanta, hoping to allay her fears.
Mifkin went to the door and tried the knob. It was—wait for it—locked. While he searched his pockets for his key, Marcel Lapin-Défunt came up alongside him and spoke softly in his (Mifkin’s) ear: “Monsieur. . .I heard the scream myself, as my wife and I were just walking down the corridor at the time. . .”
“Yes?” asked Mifkin, not terribly bothered, as he found his key in an upper vest pocket.
“Well, it’s just that. . .between you and me. . .”
Mifkin turned to him, key at the ready. “What is it, monsieur?”
Lapin-Défunt looked at the others, watching them, sighed, and whispered so they could not hear: “The cry was not one of pain, or agony, necessarily—though I suppose there was that too.”
“Then which emotion could the cry be described as having expressed, monsieur?”
Lapin-Défunt considered how best to word it, then simply said it outright: “Sexual crescendo. Monsieur.”
Mifkin squinted at him whilst turning the key in the lock, then opened the door and stepped in to find the bare soles of the coronel’s feet sticking out from the collapsed tower of relics, the candle long since extinguished. Lapin-Défunt, Arthur Drig, Glenn Stoupes and others helped Mifkin throw off the debris, and, once he had been revealed and rolled over, the coronel’s dead, open eyes stared out at the crowd as if at a surpassingly entertaining carnival attraction. His mouth hung open in a grimace, with dried blood tracing a trail from it, down his neck, and rivuleting off across his chest, where there were, unignorably, the unmistakable marks of repeated blows from a blunt instrument which had broken through his ribs and exposed his organs to the eyes of his spectators.