Chapter 1
My hands are ever so unsettlingly still. I was a most rational man. I am a most rational man. I was only the most pragmatic of the sect which was Oxford Law 1915’. I was, and still do bear the burden of a terrible mediocrity to which I succumb and cower to. To due terms, I have come with that and realised that as plain as I am in my look I am in my mind. The sole exquisite thing about me is that I think as would any man, which in such dark times is a true Graal. That made me rational.
Thus were the ways Cesar Jowitt spoke to himself. Some day, in his state of perpetual nausea, he was eating some fine muesli that had perchance become the nesting place of some French moths, when the phone rang with a buzz that made his ears ring with ire. The terrible tap-tap of the wheel, that wretched dial tone. He felt violated by its intonation and was on the brink of a great deal of widow weeping, were it not for its immediate cessation. Monsieur Jowitt approached it and rang back, for he no longer had to bear the melodic tones of that abomination of a tin can that people in France call a phone. Upon it, the yet-sodden keys slid across his fingers like a rotting head.
Sticky, foul, and foetid, absinthe dripping upon the telephone. Absinthe which had once been part of his entity but had been rendered impure for his rational, factual body which accepted no liquid of ink’s hue. He had eaten nothing, for worried was he about the harpy of a statue that he had seen roaming the street, so the absinthe was as clear as if I had drenched it from the bottle.
He was an atypical typical man from Cheshire, with his nature mistaken for laconic when he was merely haughty.
A voice answered the phone.
“Messer, bother not… Monsieur Jowitt?”.
He nodded. Upon hearing what the co-intervenant raved upon, he sighed and let his mediocrity yet again succumb to him. Him? Catch a murderer? That is much too childish, for murderers such as these bear no ration. To murder in a museum! No, it must be of great practicality to kill. To kill must be methodical; it is merely the act of removing something which was never yours to begin. The fibrillations commenced and yet again, Cesar lay down in the greatest of tremor.
“Your wonderful intricacy of mind has been brought to the interest of the owners of the Museum —— (unnamed for reasons of Cesar’s privacy. He has personally inscribed a declaration that the name shall never be disclosed) and M.Brodeur. A terrible silence ensued, and the static of the phone purred in Cesar’s ear. Finally, the woman spoke. “They’ve put you on a case, Messer.”
An art heist perhaps, one of many he had dealt with since his youth.
“It’s a gosh darn triple murder, you ignorant swine!” she vocalised. Only in truth, she spoke not that way and it was all his mind’s fabulation. Her speech was all the more gentle:
“Dear, it’s more than a heist. It’s a triple murder. I would bother you not for a mere heist!” she exclaimed. “M. Brodeur has requested your presence.”
His presence was precious, Cesar indeed agreed. Oh, so terribly precious, the presence of mediocrity amongst that of the great and apt. How a man of the deepest commonality was required to counterpoise the nonpareils of detectiveship.
“Tell whomever hired me I’ll come. Pro bono, I’m not interested in the museum’s cash.” The nice lady confirmed the statement and hung up with a smooth click.
Pfft. Pro bono. Law school reminiscences. He buried his head in the mound of stained pillows and waited for his nausea to subside, to give in and allow him to maintain his stale disposition. When the room had ceased spinning like a washing machine in the corner laundromat, Cesar walked out and returned, his figure plastered to the brim like some papier mache statue with the latest newspapers. He sat down and sunk back into those pillows with his head in a terrible fuzz. He downed his Clomipramine and with a massive puff evading his nostrils, laid back and leafed over the newspaper.
“The Ludovica Wing- Triple Murder of Tourists Visiting Museum”
Oh, how vapid, how jejune to die and have your expiry in the news for one to read and take a seconds gratification in chewing on a peanut butter sandwich whilst glossetting the gruesome minutiae of some death.
He presently dropped the newspaper and rose, the sickening sentiment still in his throat. Upon his shoulders he slung a coat of a size too large for his figure and unto his bare legs drew up a pair of tweed trousers, their threads already done in and past their time. Making haste in such ways that the cuffs of his trousers would not get stepped unto by his leather boots (for he would much suffer were the aged tweed trousers dirty before reaching the museum) he got onto the Métro at Raspail.
The car was filled to the brim with scents and sights repulsive yet familiar to Cesar. The sweat-imbrued man sleeping upon two chairs engrossed so much of his irritation that he almost missed the sight of the young woman puffing her cigar in the face of an infant when the window above them was snapped shut. Yet, Cesar kept himself as was the wretched window; shut and not uttering a single word in spite of his need for choler and fresh air.
“Saint-Placide. Saint-Placide.”
Here, he ran off, his cap left upon a seat in that insalubrious metro car. He ran in the winter brume, the cuffs of his trousers sodden in slough and filth. His visage clouded by his dishevelled hair he ran in such proper manner, not in hurry but in haste. At once, he reached the museum and entered, hindered by no security despite its status as a scene of crime and iniquity.
“Ah, Bonjour Monsieur Cesar,” a woman said brashly, in accompaniment of vulgar mannerisms. “Tanzi Marcovici.” As she spoke, she extended her fur-cladden hand to shake that of Cesar. When she reached for his hand, she drew back in fear, for in place of a hand, Cesar bore nothing but an empty sleeve which hung hollowly. “Oh, but excuse me, I knew not!” Tanzi cried, her hands engulfing his shoulders in a most serpentine way.
“I believed it was quite obvious that I miss a palm and forearm, but I suppose sometimes, I should cease assuming that all individuals have common sense,” Cesar responded, drawing back.
“Clement, come baby, look, he’s missing a hand, you see,” Tanzi pursued, calling upon another man. The individual by the rather french appellation, being summoned, showed himself. A man of short stature and hair so blond age showed not upon it but upon his countenance, which was ridden with sorrow.
“Mademoiselle Constance, s’il te plait, pray, stop treating me like a child. I am lucid, I am a regular man. I can myself see that he has an injury. By the way, salut Cesar,” Clement spoke, his voice ever so mild.
“Clement, you don’t use his first name! It’s Monsieur Jowitt,” she responded to him, her gawkish hand pushing his porcelain glasses up. As she did so, they dropped on the floor, and with a short crack, the frame was riven to crumbs.
“Oh Mademoiselle Constance, see what you have done now,” he sighed, drawing a second pair of glasses from his pocket and stepping away, the porcelain frame crumbling to ashen dust neath his step.
“Monsieur Jowitt, I am so terribly sorry, for both the hand incident and Clement,” Tanzi hastily said, her hand grasping his shoulder so viciously once more that a hundred tremors betook the once brave fellow.
“What you should be sorry for is not Clement but your own behaviour. It isn’t proper to so intimately touch a man you know not. Clement was more proper to me despite calling me by appellations my Mamma employs than you have been by calling me Monsieur, ” he said, withdrawing.
His glance shifted from the gaudy woman in her fur coat and costly trinkets to the museum and other beings. The plafond was gilded with depictions of ophanims and other theological ephemera. Heavy curtains of brocaded jacquard hung as palls of light’s casket and the air was fusty not with stench but staleness. It was a chamber to Cesar’s liking and hallowing, as stale and unmoved as his being.
In a corner, by a heavy framed tableau stood a woman, her eyes hanging as two stars and she, so brightly clad, that she repulsed Cesar’s insipid soul. A woman so joyous, her braids stiff upon her shoulders and neath her florid blouse a flowing kaftan. Her gaze turned not to Cesar, for she her concentration was bestowed upon a report.
“Come here, Monsieur Abeln. The autopsy states they were impaled; such a bizarre manner of death,” the woman spoke.
“You already have the autopsy? I was called following the autopsy, meaning I was a last resort. I was well aware of my mediocrity but pray, I deserve more respect than this,” Cesar stated. Indeed, he rendered that he had been disrespected.
“Had your ego not been artificially pumped up and your phone disconnected, I am tremendously certain you would have been the first on M. Brodeur’s list, Monsieur Jowitt,” she said.
“Oh Carlotte, but you are much too boorish. By the by, I am Carl. Introduce yourself not, for I am well aware of who you are, Cesar.” he told the other. He spoke in delicate tones despite his coarseness and garish demeanour, that of an youthful yet aged dancer, whose profession had left him forlorn once age no longer permitted. A cabaret dancer whose back aches as he does the turns and leaps of his youth, a ballet dancer whose shoes make her aged feet ache, a woman of the night whose clients have abandoned her for she has become old and unattractive in their shallow eyes. All of this, yet he was young. Extending his hand, he grasped Cesar’s left hand and let go before any word could be uttered.
“Was für schmutzige Schuhe du hast!”, Carl suddenly exclaimed, his eyes laid upon the sodden boots of Cesar. “Pray, take them off, Cesar. I shall have them cleaned by a friend at a finest shop. You shall take mine until I get them cleaned.” Without uttering a word, he removed the tawdry boots and held them. His fine leather flats he shod Cesar with and the boots he took, the room exiting.
‘What a most bizarre man,’ Cesar thought. ‘To walk in his bare feet upon marble in winter so that I might have clean boots!’
Such kindness he had not seen from his own mother, his own father and his own brethren. He loved them and they loved him as long as compliance held them together. Once he had forsaken law school, compliance had been torn asunder and so had love been. For a man so apathetic as Cesar Jowitt, the ardent nature of one such as Carl Abeln was a blow of scorching wind, a removal from what had once been an empty existence.
In an adjacent room, a room of disrepair and ruin, stood Carl Abeln, unshod, his feet touching the frigid marble and the glacial air striking his visage. He was hunched atop a small basin, scrubbing at Cesar’s mud-stained boots.
Comentarios