‘Tricky, kid?’ said I.
And the kid looked kind of cockeyed at me. But ain’t that the way with those Brits?
39
The snow dropped down like dandruff from the Holy Head of God.
In my business, which is one of private detection, you see these cosmic similes all the time. You have to keep in touch with your spiritual side, never forgetting that every next step could be your last and a watched boil never pops. It’s keeping this balance that helps you succeed; that and the pistol you pack.
I always pack a trusty Smith & Wesson. In this town, packing a trusty Smith & Wesson can mean the difference between pursuing a course in elegant maths and perusing the corpse of the Elephant Man, if you know what I mean and I’m sure that you do. You got to keep a balance, see, and that is what I do.
I do what I do from my office at 2727 27th Street. The office has my name on the door. And also my profession.
‘Lazlo Woodbine’, it says on the door. And ‘Private Detective’, too.
Sometimes it also says ‘GONE TO LUNCH’. But that’s when I’ve gone to lunch.
I hadn’t gone for lunch on the day that the young guy walked into my office. But then it wasn’t lunchtime. If I’d had a clock, then it might have struck ten. But I didn’t, and so it struck nine. The young guy had come all the way from England just to seek my help on a case. He didn’t tell me that this was the way of it, but then he didn’t have to. In my occupation you either know things, or you don’t. It’s an instinct, a gift, if you like, and some of us have this gift, though most of us do not.
The young guy wore black, but he wasn’t Swiss, nor was he Jewish, it seemed. He was a musician, travelling with a band called The Sumerian Kynges, in the company of something called The Flange Collective, a kind of five- and-dime carny that was presently encamped in Central Park. Although he and his fellow musicians had taken rooms at the Pentecost Hotel because, unlike carny folk, all musicians are cissies and don’t like the cold weather. And the guy’s name was Tyler and he had worries on his mind. And in this town, if you have worries on your mind, you either hit a bar or call your shrink. And if neither of those hit the spot and there is the possibility that the quelling of these worries might only be facilitated by a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a great deal of trench-coat action and a denouement that involves a final rooftop confrontation during which a villain takes the last dive to oblivion, then you call on me.
If, however, you have Georgia on your mind, then I’d recommend the jazz club down the street.
So the young guy sat down in the chair that I reserve for clients and I poured him a glass of Kentucky bourbon to ease his passage whilst he spilt his beans. His beans, it seemed, were curious beans, beans of an outre nature. In my business I encounter many a curious bean. A curious bean, a wayward sprout and a parsnip in a pale tweed. It’s all meat and fish to a guy like me. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
‘So, kid,’ said I as I tipped him the wink, ‘what is it worries your mind?’
The guy sipped his bourbon and looked ill at ease, but ain’t that the way with the Brits? It was obvious to me from the start that getting the full story out of him was going to take some time. But I was prepared to take this time as I had to know all the facts. It is of the utmost importance to know all the facts. Facts are the lifeblood of a private eye. As would be a very small whip to a trainer of cheese. So I sat back and let him speak. I let him spill his beans.
‘I’m in no hurry,’ I told the guy. And anyhow I charge by the hour.
‘It is this way, Mr Woodbine, sir,’ said the kid, with respect in his voice. ‘I have become involved in something so strange, and indeed horrifying, that I hardly know where to begin. Corpses are being reanimated, imbued with souls that are not their own. A plan is afoot to destroy all life upon this world and reduce the planet to a Necrosphere. I have seen these undead with my own eyes and I am not the only one who has. In England an organisation that calls itself the Ministry of Serendipity is involved in the extermination of these undead creatures whenever it locates them. A gentleman called Mr Ishmael told me all about this. And there is something very wrong about this gentleman, but that is not why I am here.
‘Mr Woodbine, I am here to call upon your expertise. I wish to employ your services to investigate this matter, with a view to identifying the evil mastermind behind it.’
And I made the guy pause there. ‘Kid,’ I said to him. ‘Kid, did I just hear you use the words “evil mastermind”?’
‘That you did, Mr Woodbine, sir,’ said he.
I paused for a moment, in case he wished to add the words ‘Gawd strike me dead, guv’nor, if I’m telling you a porkie pie’ in that manner so favoured by the Brits. But as he did not, I spoke certain words of my own.
‘Kid,’ I said, ‘to use the downtown vernacular, you may well be blowing Dixie out of your ass, but if there is an evil mastermind involved, then you came a-knocking on the right detective’s door this brisk morning.’ And I topped up my glass and that of my client and let him go rambling on.
He was no literary eruditioner, like some of those famous Brits are. Your Walter Shakespeare, or your Guy Fawkes-Nights. But he could put his sentences together in the right order, and he kept his feet off my desk, so I kinda took a liking to the guy. Clearly he was suffering from a mental condition, chronic schizophrenia allied with an acute persecution complex resulting in audio/visual hallucinations, or was simply a fruitcake, as we in this town would say. But I liked the cut of his shoulders and as business was slack for the time of the year, what with most of the New York criminals being down in Miami at Crim-Con 69, I agreed to take the case and see which way it led.
‘Kid,’ I told the guy, ‘you may have bumblebees in your watering can, but who can say what your uncle keeps in his shed?’
The kid said, ‘Eh?’ But he knew what I meant. And I knew that he knew I knew.
‘So,’ said the guy, ‘what do we do next?’
‘We?’ I said. ‘We? Well, I’ll tell you what you do. You hoik your bankroll out and peel me off two hundred bucks.’
I noted a certain hesitation here, but I put this down to that British reticence and sexual repression that I’d heard so much about. From Fangio, who had once been to Brighton. At a barmans’ convention, Toot-Con 55. Fangio had sung the praises of the English women, whom, he claimed, rarely wore anything other than three trained ducks. And wellington boots for the rain.
The guy paid up front with two fifties, three twenties, two tens, four fives, nine ones and a three that I handed back to him. Those crazy Brits, eh, what do you make of them? And they say that they won the war.
‘Where to?’ asked the guy of me.
And I said, ‘Fangio’s Bar.’
Like I told the guy earlier, I work only the four locations. No genre detective worthy of his ACME sock- suspenders and patent-pending ball-and-socket truss needs more. And once I’d interviewed a client in my office, the next stop was always the bar. It can be any bar, let me be clear on that, but it must be a bar. It is the way things must be done, if they are to be done with style. And according to format.
I put the ‘GONE TO LUNCH’ sign on my door, although you wouldn’t have seen that because I do not work corridors, and moments later, as if through the means of a lap-dissolve, found myself in Fangio’s Bar.
As it was nearing lunchtime now, the joint was beginning to jump. The uptown chic in natty black and downtown noncer in beige. A cheese-trainer from Illinois, here searching for a venue for Cheese-Con 70. [21] A couple of Dacks, a McMurdo and a chim-chim-cheree-chim-cheroo. The McMurdo was sitting on my favourite bar stool, so he got the short shrift that was coming to him.
‘A bottle of Bud,’ I said to Fangio, the fat-boy barman. ‘And whatever my client here is having. And put it on my client’s tab, as soon as you’ve written one up.’
‘That all sounds rather complicated,’ said Fangio. ‘Would you care to run it by me again? Or perhaps not so much run as jog purposefully? ’
‘Not as such,’ I said to Fange. ‘Especially not on a day like this.’
‘This day is a new one on me,’ said the fat-boy, with wisdom. ‘And I’d just come to terms with yesterday when
