You’ll have your own favourite greatest crime in history, Mr Historian of the Gods of Ludgvennok, but I can tell you this wasn’t it. And why wasn’t it?
Because of this! He smites his heart.
Would he have done what Clarence Worthing did had he been in his position? Would he have assisted in their escape? Tears flood his eyes. The sublime music swells in his ears. . ertrinken. . versinken. . unbewußt. . höchste Lust!. . Yes, he and Clarence Worthing are one, made weak and strong by love.
Finishing off what is left in the bottle, he rejoins Densdell Kroplik on the couch where, exhausted by the intensity of his own emotion, he falls immediately asleep on Kroplik’s shoulder, the convulsing cat, heaving up fur balls coated in clay dust, between them.
It’s only a shame no family photographer is in attendance.
ii
It’s Kroplik who wakes first, still drunk. It takes him a moment or two to work out where he is. Though it’s only early afternoon it’s dark already in St Eber, the shabby pyramids of clay, as though each is lit from within by a small candle, the sole illumination.
Is this Egypt?
Then he notices that the cat has coughed up a puddle of china-clay slime on the lapel of his one smart suit. Or is it Gutkind’s doing? It smells as though it’s been in Gutkind’s stomach. Kroplik clutches his own. He lives on a daily diet of indignity but this is one insult he doesn’t have to bear. He has brought his razor along to give the detective inspector a close shave as a token of his friendship and regard. But he is too angry to be a friend. Slime! From Gutkind’s poisoned gut! On his one good suit!
He is aware that Gutkind has been ranting at him while he slept. The usual subject — villainy. Was he telling him he knew — teasing him, taunting him with his knowledge. I know the difference between right and wrong Kroplik is sure he heard him say through his stupor. Provocation is no defence. This time. .
Is this why he was invited over?
It amazes him that Gutkind should have the brains to solve a crime. Yes, he’d as good as laid it out for him a hundred times, but Gutkind had struck him as too dumb to see what was in front of his face.
I’ve underestimated him, Kroplik decides. I’ve fatally underestimated the cunt. And laughs appreciatively at his own choice of words. Make a good final chapter heading for the next volume of his history — no, not ‘The Cunt’, but ‘A Fatal Underestimation’.
He thinks about taking out his razor, putting it to Gutkind’s throat, and confessing. What would the policeman do then? Throw up some more? Then he has a better idea. He staggers to his feet and closes the curtains. I’ll just cut his throat and have done, he has decided.
But it’s the cat that gets it first.
SEVEN. Nussbaum Unbound
i
ESME NUSSBAUM LAY in what the doctors called a coma for two months after the motorcyclist rode the pavement and knocked her down. To her it was a long and much-needed sleep. A chance to think things over without interruption. Regain perspective. And maybe lose a little weight.
She wasn’t joking about the weight. She was done with looking comfortable and unthreatening. It was time to show more bone. Splintered bone, she laughed to herself, causing the screen to bleep, though she didn’t doubt the bone would mend eventually. It wasn’t that she’d been incapable of causing discomfort when discomfort needed to be caused. She was known to be a woman who sometimes asked troublesome questions. But there’d been no real spike inside her. She could annoy without quite inspiring fear. Now she fancied being someone else. No, now she was someone else. Someone with sharper edges, all spikes. Broken, she was more frightening.
Already her thoughts were unlike any she’d had before. They flew at her. In her previous, comfortable life she would reason her way to a conclusion, which meant that she could be reasoned out of it in time as well. The motorcycle hadn’t really been necessary. There were other ways of making her conformable. .
Comfortable and Conformable — her middle names. Esme C. C. Nussbaum. Always a word-monger, an anagramatiser, a palindromaniac, she now saw words three-dimensionally in her sleep. Comfortable and Conformable cavorted lewdly on the ceiling of her unconsciousness, pressing their podgy bellies together like middle-aged lovers, blowing into each other’s ears, two becoming one. She smiled inside herself. It really was a pleasure lying here, waiting for what words would get up to next, what thoughts would come whooshing at her. She liked being the subject of their discussions. It was like listening in to gossip about herself. No, she wasn’t as Comfortable or Conformable as she blamed herself for being, was the latest revelation. If she’d been that easy to get on with, what was she doing here, lying in a coma, half dead? She must have put the wind up someone. That was one of the most persistent of her winged thoughts: people frighten easily. Another was: people — ordinary people, people you think you know and like — want to kill you.
She was not herself frightened when such thoughts flew at her. She had once watched an old horror film with her parents about a blonde woman being attacked by birds. They had been terrified as a family. They put their hands over their faces as the birds dive-bombed everyone in the blonde’s vicinity. ‘Avenging some great but never to be disclosed wrong,’ her father said. But lying flat with thoughts flying at her was not like that. She didn’t feel assailed. There was no more they could do to her — that partly explained her calm acceptance of their presence, even when they swooped so low she might justifiably have worried for her eyes. But it was more than being beyond terror. She welcomed their violence. It was Conformable with how she felt. They were thoughts, after all, which meant they originated in her. If this was herself massing above her, screeching, well then. . she extended all the hospitality she had to offer. It was about time. A good time, yes, in that she had bags of it to give; but about time in the sense that she had wasted too much of it thinking thoughts that were less. . less what? How nice it was having all the time in the world to find the right word. Less. . less. . Esme Nussbaum knew more words than was good for her. She had been the school Scrabble champion; she could finish a crossword while others were still on the first clue; she knew words even her teachers thought did not exist. Now she raided her store for a word that had bird in it, that sounded avian, an av word. Avirulent had a ring, but it meant the opposite of what she needed it to mean. She didn’t want to lose the virulence, she wanted to store it. Avile was good — to avile, as she’d had to explain to a sceptical Scrabble opponent in the quarter-finals, meaning to make vile, to debase. But there was no adjective to go with it that she knew of. No avilious. And no noun, no aviliousness. Had there been, then aviliousness was exactly the quality her previous, unwinged thoughts had lacked. They had been too moderate. Too sparing. Yes, she had presented a report, for which they’d killed her — in intention, if not in fact — that spoke of the persistent rage she’d found in the course of monitoring the nation’s mood. She had not tried to sugar that pill. We cannot, she had argued, glide over the past with an IF. We must confront WHAT HAPPENED, not to apportion blame — it was too late for that, anyway — but to know what it was and why time hadn’t healed it. Yes, she had stood her ground, said what had to be said, done her best to persuade the IFFERS with whom she worked, but that best wasn’t good enough. She hadn’t followed the logic of her own findings. She had been insufficiently avilious. She hadn’t made vile, that’s to say she hadn’t grasped, hadn’t penetrated and presented, even to herself, the vileness of what had been done. Not WHAT HAD HAPPENED but WHAT HAD BEEN DONE.