Clay felt his knees begin to tremble with nervous energy. “Mr. Tate, I don’t cheat anyone. That’s not how I do my business.”
Tate laughed again, face quite red. “Man, I deal every day with guys a hell of a lot sharper than you, minute by minute. I could smell you a mile away. Thought you could razzle-dazzle us with all this photo-gear crap and then get enough cash to buy a boat or some damn thing. Well, it’s not going to work! Clean up your trash and get out of my house!”
Chrissy tried again, but it was Clay who interrupted. “I have a deal for you.”
There. The man looked interested. “You do? What kind of deal?”
The only type you’ll understand, he thought. Clay looked around the room. “Here’s what I’m offering. I’ve got another idea of how to make this work. If that happens, and you agree, then I’ll charge you just materials. No labor. And if the idea doesn’t work, then I’ll leave, free and clear, and you won’t owe me a thing.”
“How long?” Jack demanded.
“Just a few minutes,” he said.
Chrissy said, “It sounds reasonable, Jack. You know it does.”
Her husband made a show of settling back down on the couch, not quite hiding the triumph in his eyes. “You want it to sound reasonable so you’re not embarrassed. That’s why. Okay, photo man. Go ahead. You’ve got five minutes.”
Clay stepped away from the couch, headed back over to his photo gear. “Five minutes it is,” he said. “Just lie back and keep your eyes closed.”
Chrissy then said something low and sharp to her husband, and he replied, and she said, “Hunh, we’ll see about that!”
Clay squatted down on the floor, let his fingers rummage through his toolbox. Another flare of light as the thunderstorm approached. He had tried. Honest he had, from setting up the legit business to going on the straight and narrow, never letting anything get away from him.
But they had pushed and prodded him, right from the moment he had arrived. They had asked him. Customer’s choice, he thought. Not my fault.
There. He found what he was looking for. He stood up.
“Here I come,” he said, and as he walked over to them he held the hunting knife close to his thigh, letting a thumb lovingly and caressingly go over the sharp blade.
The Gooseberry Fool
by James Powell
Readers who enjoyed James Powell’s April 1999 story “Jerrold’s Meat” will he pleased to learn that the tale is currently nominated for Canada’s most prestigious mystery prize, the Arthur Ellis Award. Mr. Powell has ten (yes, ten!) previous nominations for the Arthur Ellis. This year’s winner will be announced in Toronto at the end of May (just a few days from this writing). May this he your year, Jim!
In the early 1880s Europe was visited each year by a plague of assassinations at the hands of the same hired killer. The Continent’s prefects of police christened this man the Gooseberry Fool because his annual itinerary approximated that of the hero in Andre Jurry’s incomparable operetta of the same name.
Jurry’s music told the legend of a nobleman from a northern clime whose passion for gooseberries sent him rattling southward in his carriage as soon as the roads were passable, startling crocuses from the ground and gilding willows along the way as if he were spring itself. Down the Danube valley, down the Adriatic coast to the very heel of the Italian boot he rolled and then was ferried, carriage and all, across to Corfu where Europe’s first gooseberries hung ripe on the bush. Through spring and summer, the nobleman followed the maturing fruit northward in easy stages up into France and Germany, with a final cold, autumnal rush across the gooseberry fields of East Prussia.
But even though the police knew the which-way and the when — MURDER BY RAILROAD SCHEDULE, the newspapers called it — such was the Gooseberry Fool’s skill and mastery of disguise that they could no more prevent his first assassination than stop the arrival of the first robin of the year. The hired killer came with a full order book and claimed his victims until the foliage turned.
Customarily, the police would have sought help from the fearsome Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency. But age had dimmed those fabled powers, while his son and namesake remained an untried cub, a tinkerer among test tubes and flammarion flasks.
On a Saturday morning in July, 1885, Ambrose Ganelon II emerged from 18 bis rue Blondin, the family residence and the offices of the Ganelon detective agency, carrying a small suitcase. More than just a taller version of the father, the son’s long legs, so becoming in his cavalry-officer days, now gave him a civilian elegance. Where the Founder, all scowl and armchair, brooded over cases like a python digesting a pig, until only the skeleton of truth remained, the son perambulated, preferring to talk things out on long walks about the city, his companions struggling to match his stride. At a later date, his elegance and tenacity would earn him the nickname, the Bouledogue des Boulevards.
A policeman with dandruff on his cape guarded the agency’s doorway. One had for years now, since the Founder’s faculty of ratiocination was declared a treasure of the principality. Acknowledging his salute, Ganelon went to stand at the curb. He could almost hear the policeman ask himself why a Ganelon was leaving town during Gooseberry Fool alert. Was San Sebastiano to go the way of Paris, protecting itself from the assassin by following its prefect of police on vacation for the month of August, leaving the city to waiters and American tourists?
But the Gooseberry Fool had not yet dared kill in San Sebastiano. Ganelon, who did not want to remain forever in his father’s shadow, wished he would try. In any event, Ganelon was not going far. Young Baron Charles Sandor lived only a few miles away across the Porpentine, the river which until twenty-five years ago marked the eastern boundary of San Sebastiano just as the Tortue marked its western limits (a fact which explains why the supporters of San Sebastiano’s busy coat of arms are that marriage made in heaven, the turtle and the porcupine).
The Sandor money came from Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment, a preparation named after a local of the previous century legendary for his age and limberness of joints. The current baron’s grandfather, Baron Justin, an avid phrenologist (some said he possessed an immense bump of credulity), had assembled for study a collection of plaster heads of murderers.
Ganelon had written some months ago for permission to examine Baron Justin’s collection. Though impressed by the recent anthropometric work of the phrenologist Bertillon, Ganelon considered the man’s fourteen identification measurements clumsy. He hoped to find his own cluster of three or four unique to each individual on the skull near the sphenoid bone.
Having the patience of plaster, the baron’s heads would be far easier to measure than Ganelon’s restless friends. He was beginning to believe the Sandors still bore an ancient grudge against the Ganelons because the Founder brought one of their servants to book for murder. Then yesterday evening he received a hand-delivered invitation to spend the weekend studying the heads and to meet the Hereditary Nawab of Jamkhandi and some of Sandor’s business associates, all come for the hunting.
The Nawab was renowned in his own land as a builder of hospitals, temples, and schools, and famous abroad as a student of the human conscience, eager to promote whatever might increase mankind’s desire to do good and avoid evil.
The Sandor carriage arrived punctually, the crest on the door bearing the same figure of the lean old man leaping in air to kick his heels which graced each bottle of Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment. Ganelon expected it would have first met the early train from Milan and was not surprised to find a passenger inside. His traveling companion looked up from a gilt-edged prayer book; his long, pale face was made longer and paler still by a flourish of black sideburns. The vehicle reeked of lavender cologne.