“Could you just bring me a bowl of chipped ice?” Gilrein says through fingers dabbing lightly at his lips. It’s been less than an hour since the Inspector swathed them with the horrid-smelling mud, but already he can speak again.
Lacazze shakes his head and inclines toward the waitress.
“He’ll have a glass of the Spanish sherry.”
“Malflores?” Katrina asks.
“The private label,” Lacazze whispers and winks.
Katrina departs and the two men stare at each other.
“Have you ever been down below before?” the Inspector asks.
“Never,” Gilrein lies.
Ceil brought him to the Vermin once on one of her book hunts. She was supposed to meet with a periodicals dealer who never showed.
“Are you a regular?” Gilrein asks.
Lacazze smiles and shakes his head.
“I know Rikki from the neighborhood. Not a bad sport but just a bit too needy. If you know what I mean.”
“I think I can guess.”
“So,” as the Inspector gets comfortable in his chair and steals a glance around the room, “would you like to tell your brother officer who did this to you?”
“Brother officer?” Gilrein repeats. “Is either one of us still on the job?”
Lacazze bows his head and raises his eyes.
“Technically, and for tax purposes, I’m an independent consultant. But I retain my commission. And all the powers of the badge.”
“Well, God and Chief Bendix both work in perverse ways.”
Lacazze smiles.
“It’s mysterious, Mr. Gilrein,” he says. “The word is ‘mysterious,’ not ‘perverse.’”
“My mistake.”
“And in either case,” Lacazze says, “it doesn’t ring true coming from your unfortunate lips. I’m sure Ceil told me you were a devout atheist.”
“No,” Gilrein plays along. “I’m just a cabdriver. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the esoteric.”
“Just as well. Though, to be honest, I really can’t make myself care about which systems you do or do not subscribe to, Mr. Gilrein. Whether you bow down before the classical Western Daddy in the sky or some notion of romantic fate or that old bitch of cruel and random chance, none of it matters to me. But I might enjoy my drink a bit more if we could agree that whatever the agent, it is fortuitous that you and I have been brought together again. Perhaps we should even thank August Kroger.”
Katrina arrives with the drinks and places them on the table.
The Inspector raises his glass of Siena and says, “To the men in Ceil’s all-too-brief life.”
Gilrein doesn’t move for a moment. Then he breaks eye contact and touches his bottom lip without flinching. He pulls the fingers away, looks at the smear of tacky blood and residual silt, and says, “Are you trying to bait me, Inspector?”
“Bait you?” Sipping the Siena, he shakes his head and tries to look amused. “Not at all. Just the opposite.”
Lacazze pulls down a long drink and rotates his head around his neck as he speaks.
“When I came to this city, I looked out from the hill on my first night and cursed my own particular construct of faith—”
“That’s an odd phrasing,” Gilrein says.
The interruption seems to focus Lacazze. His voice drops and he says, “Yes,” in something of a drawl. “I suppose I’ve never been able to wear my learning very lightly.”
“Hazard of the trade, I guess.”
“Which trade are you referring to?” Lacazze asks. “I’ve had a few.”
“Your choice,” Gilrein says.
The Inspector tries to shrug but it comes off as a shiver.
“Every profession has its quirks. But my point is that I was wrong to profane my new home. It may not be Paris but it has its own charms. And, more importantly I’ve found, it appears to be the locus where my most important work is to come together.”
“I thought all your important work was behind you, Inspector.”
The old priest goes silent for a moment and stares down at his glass.
“That would be a misconception, my son. But it’s not your fault. I don’t expect you to be familiar with my Methodology. I know Ceil was never comfortable discussing her work at home. She didn’t want to burden you.”
“My wife was a considerate woman.”
“Among other things.”
Gilrein lets it go.
“I’m sure I heard the department had abandoned the”—a pause to show a little contempt for the word—“Methodology.”
“Oh, Gilrein,” the Inspector’s voice faux-tired from dealing with deficient minds all his life, “my work for the city was only the lowest function of my system. I’m moving on to the next phase, so to speak. I’m taking my child out of the laboratory and into the street. Where it belongs. Where it can find its own organic ends. We need a new language, Gilrein. Surely, your wife must have shared at least this one secret with you?”
“Like you said, I don’t think she wanted to burden me.”
The Inspector nods, pulls down his jaw to show his impression of fatherly understanding.
“You have no idea,” he says, “how often I wish she was still with us. She’s the only witness I would want for what’s to come. She’s the only one qualified to appreciate where we go next.”
“We?”
“The city, Gilrein. Our city, ‘these streets of oozing muck,’ to quote a poet I once knew. Quinsigamond is where the final battle of the war will be fought.”
“The war?” Gilrein repeats.
But the Inspector has moved from conversation to soliloquy.
“Think of all the arrogant, logocentric rationalists before me. I could spit in every one of their enigmatic faces. Reason lovers. With their cannibal picnics and their Japanese fashion shows. Every one with their own metalanguage. Every little bastard promising the Grail, the map out of the darkness. Promising us they could slow down the world, cool down the input, build us a new tongue that would be the universal translator we’ve lusted after since they built the beautiful tower in Shinar—”
Gilrein says, “Inspector,” reasserting his presence just to stop the babble.
Lacazze blinks a few times, sniffs, and stares at his table companion as if one of them has just woken up.
“You brought me here to tell me something.”
Lacazze’s mouth opens and closes. Gilrein leans in and gets a smell, something close to paint thinner.
“Inspector?”
A deep exhale and then, “I wanted to tell you—”
But Lacazze’s words are interrupted by microphone squeal as Rikki Tzara bounds onto the stage, ubiquitous handkerchief at the ready, mopping his brow as if he’s just wrapped up a lifetime of telethon appeals.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Tzara says, and waits for some modicum of quiet to fall over the lounge, “as you know, it is the mission of the Cabaret Vermin to discover and encourage new talent wherever we may find it. In constant pursuit of that mission we have established Saturday night here in the Rudi Anhang Room as open mike night to showcase the finest amateur entertainers in our fair city. So without further ado, I’d like to introduce our first act of the evening, a really sweet guy, he’s just trying to break into the business, would you give a big, warm Vermin welcome for Shecky Langer.”
Otto Langer walks out onstage dressed in a rented tux that’s clearly too small for him, carrying Zwack the golem, his ventriloquial dummy. Zwack looks like a cross between the Gothic wood-carving of some nightmare-plagued folk artist and a Raggedy Ann doll that’s been dragged through a thousand ghettos in the teeth of a mange-scarred dog. The house lights go down and a classic blue spot comes up and trains itself on a profusely sweating Langer seated on a bar stool, a glass of tap water resting near his feet. For a moment he looks hypnotized by the spotlight, stares into it as if it was a sun about to go nova. Then the drummer cues him with an introductory burst of timpani and Langer snaps out of his trance and nods to the audience. He positions his figure on his lap and uses his free hand to adjust her black-yarn pigtails.