Chapter Seventeen
As the reader will without too much difficulty imagine, the news of a second murder, the strong suspicion that Pluck could not have been the murderer, and the consequent, logical surmise that the true murderer was still at large, replaced all other topics of conversation amongst the hotel’s patrons with the deranged vehemence of an outraged matriarch jerking the tablecloth, along with its contents, off a dinner table by way of conveying her opinion.
Many guests remained in their rooms, locking their doors, and, in so doing, unconsciously resurrecting Pluck’s original intention of incarcerating the whole of the hotel. One member of each party—usually, with a ruthless, unapologetic sexism with which the era was rife, the male—would venture, cautiously, unlit candle holder or some other implement at the ready, in order to snatch a hamper of food from the kitchen, then return. The dining room was depopulated to a startling degree—startling, I suppose, if you were easily startled, lacking any steel to your nerve or spine in your ethics—save for some older guests, who had made their peace with life, or the likes of Deirdre Laoghaire, who positively welcomed death.
The porter, Curtis/Thaddeus, for unexplained reasons, had taken it into his head to run around tripping and insulting people, evoking appalled remonstrations and threats of physical retribution against his person. For instance, whilst passing Monsieur Bruneau on the stairs, Curtis/Thaddeus openly described him as a “fucking pig”. To Bruneau’s polite “Pardon?”, Curtis/Thaddeus repeated, openly: “You, monsieur, are a fucking pig.” Twisting round awkwardly on the steps to confront this impudent servant, Bruneau caught sight of him skipping away, laughing. Bruneau took chase, but lost him in the labyrinth of interconnecting service rooms. Or, again, Curtis/Thaddeus thought nothing of strolling up to Rosella one morning in the patio and claiming, “I once had sexual relations with you”—when, in fact, which Rosella could have told you as authoritatively as could I, no such coitus had ever occurred. As such, she moved to slap him, but again, he skipped nimbly away, blowing raspberries lovingly over his shoulder.
Enid—not from any extraordinary, conscious courage, but more from a habit of gliding along with only a blurred focus on life; like a mother’s fluttering fingertips brushing just above her drowsing toddler’s hair-tuft, establishing without physical contact a logically insupportable, yet emotionally undeniable, union—did not remain in her room, but wandered about, pondering things. One of the things she pondered was, Why go on, since I’m as good as resolved that everything around me is entirely devoid of meaning? Another, more apropos of current events, was, Who could want the coronel dead? She mentally inventoried all the guests and staff she knew, but none would seem to have a—what was that term? That thing that never seemed to much trouble Pluck? Oh yes: motive.
She knocked on the door of Sri Aadi Gangakanta—she wasn’t sure why. He opened the door (what choice did he have—cry out “Go away, damn you! Damn you!” and remain within?), Nod-eyed.
“I’m sorry. Have I woken you?”
He shook his head. “Meditating,” he explained.
“Oh. I’ve never tried that. . .not formally.”
“May I help you, Miss Trojczakowski?”
“I’m sorry?” She’d been thinking about something else.
He smiled, tolerantly. “Was there a reason you’ve come to my room?”
“Oh, that? No. Not really.”
The gentleman was unsure how to respond; his mouth opened, but no relevant words volunteered themselves.
Enid, meanwhile, found herself staring at this eminently sensible-looking man: in a modest white suit (who meditates in a suit?), barefoot, face unsketchably peaceful in repose, staring back at her.
“Yes,” she finally answered, “yes, I do have a reason, come to think of it. May I come in?”
After a hasty mental calculation concluding that it would have been interpreted by society as unacceptably ungallant to refuse and shut the door in her face, Gangakanta stepped aside to allow her to enter. As, likewise, it would have seemed pointlessly rude to, after his gesture, turn and walk away without a word, Enid followed suit by entering. Her host, as an unofficial sacrifice on the altar of the goddess Propriety, left the door open. She (Enid, not the goddess Propriety) took a quick glance at the scrupulous arrangement of native trinkets about the room, dismissed them as barbaric totems and turned to face him.
“Who do you think killed Snede?”
He replied as if he’d been expecting such a question, though how could he have? “I do not know. At what conclusion did you, and the rest of the investigating team, arrive?”
She shrugged, as she figured it would adequately evince the tone she wished to convey without the more cumbersome involvement of words. She then expanded on this gesture verbally: “The inspector had many theories, none of them stable.”
“Perhaps that is the nature of this world,” Gangakanta offered. “In an unstable world, how can truths about that world prove stable?” He gestured to a chair, and, immediately comprehending his meaning, she sat therein (in the chair—not in the meaning). He, taking his cue from her, sat down on an ottoman across the way (“the way” here carrying the sense of “across the small room”, unfreighted with any Taoist implication); meaning that both of them could, now, be said to be seated. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)
“Perhaps, but in this world, as far as I’ve gathered,” Enid riposted with both charm and logic, “people would feel far more comfortable to know that murderers have been caught and punished according to some measure of solidity. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“You sound as if you’ve had more truck with the world than I. As such, I will bow to your experience.”
Enid smiled, and waved away his offer of a drink of water. “It’s all very well to treat it all as a game. . .”
He sighed, with a hint of a chortle within it as well. “I must confess that that is precisely how I’ve always treated life. I cannot help it. It seems, to me, to be the way life begs us to treat it.”
“I understand. And I wonder if your approach might be just that which I’d need to help me.”
“To help you with what?”
“Do you think Pluck could have killed Snede?”
“Do you?”
“No. But that’s what many people are saying.”
She looked at him, awaiting a reply, while, for a minute, he thought in silence. “. . .It’s entirely possible it was he, out of an unsurprising streak of sociopathy, or cry for attention, or conscious effort to manufacture a situation through which to amass unto himself a degree of respect to which he would otherwise never be entitled, or misdirected spiritual or sexual impulses—or some uncataloguable mixture thereof. But then again, it’s just as possible it was not.”
Enid bent forward. “I agree.”
“If Pluck killed Snede, the death of the coronel could be unrelated.”
“Yes.”
“Or, one man—”
“Or woman.”
“Or combination, could have killed them both.”
“What if the coronel killed Snede?”
“Then someone who, unlike you or I, was privy to such information might have killed the coronel for revenge.”
“Or Pluck and the coronel might have been working together.”
“Or Pluck might have, somehow, killed Snede without intending to. As I understand it, the inspector’s clumsiness and incompetence reached such unprecedentedly stratospheric levels that he might very well have, say, repeatedly tripped against Snede whilst negligently carrying a sledgehammer.”
“Truth told, it might be any one of us, guest or staff, or someone hiding somewhere we’ve never even seen!”
“Or me—or even you, Miss Trojczakowski, if it comes to that.”
They smiled at one another. Enid wondered how he could muse upon such provocative possibilities so calmly—that the woman sat across from him in his room might be a murderess, or that he was half-confessing his own crimes?
She lay one hand upon the other on her knee, and, just for the moment, risking his mockery, sought to swing open the farm gate and let logic trot off for a leisurely graze. She said, looking anywhere but at him, “All suppositions aside, Sri Gangakanta, I know in my heart that Pluck had nothing to do with it.”
“That is perfectly all right with me, Miss Trojczakowski. I hope you realise that I don’t much care if anybody’s been murdered or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well—if it comes to being a game. . .perhaps I should explain. I apologise in advance for troubling you with references to my personal situation.”
“Not at all.”
“You did ask. . .”
“Yes. I wish to know. Please go on.”
“Well. I imagine that most of the patrons of this establishment travelled out here, to the middle of, if we’re going to call a thing what it is, nowhere—a nowhere in which we’re now all trapped, seemingly for eternity—for purposes of relaxation, exercise, or, in short, some form of enjoyment. But not I.”
“You came here for spiritual purposes?” she guessed.
He looked her up and down, rather comically, then laughed, a little, through his nose, a laugh that, were it bound up with mucus, would never have been considered a laugh at all, but rather the rude expulsion of phlegm unapprehended by handkerchief, or even prevented from visibility by the cruder barrier prophylactic of a gentleman’s sleeve. “I’m afraid I can’t properly lay claim to that, Miss Trojczakowski, no. Rather, it was an escape from crushing city life, a place to wallow in pure coldness. Not to commune with God, you see, but to commune with nothingness.”
“I’m afraid of nothingness.” She didn’t know why she was volunteering this bit of personal weakness to a stranger, but there it was. “It makes me feel as if I were going to fall off the edge of the world.”
“Imagine that!” He sat back. “What a splendid experience would that be.”
For a moment, in the silence that followed, with both of them still—Gangakanta sat rigidly straight, a hand on each knee, eyes closed, strange ecstatic half-smile tweaking his lips, and Enid watching him as she would a statue, whilst willing all her thoughts into vapour—the scene would have appeared, had an observer been present, to show a universe just ended, its final exposure having imprinted itself on the retina for an elongated instant before it, with everything else, would fade.
But Gangakanta’s eyes opened, and Enid smoothed the back of her hair with her palm, embarrassed at the untoward intimacy she’d felt but for which she could not account, and time resumed.
“Help me,” she asked. “Let us find the murderer, or murderers.”
Something glinted in his eye. “And if Fate is the murderer?”
“Then let us find his instruments.”
He nodded. “I have finished my last copy of Boy’s Own. I suppose this will do.”