Murder For Revenge

Barnie-slyness, barnie-freedom, shone from their great round gap-toothed faces: in precisely the ma

The door closed, and we were alone. Each of the black-suited darlings snapped a business card from his right jacket pocket and extended it to me with a twirl of the fingers. One card read:

MR. CLUBB AND MR. CUFF

Private Detectives Extraordinaire

Mr. Clubb

and the other:

MR. CLUBB AND MR. CUFF

Private Detectives Extraordinaire

Mr. Cuff

I inserted the cards into a pocket and expressed my delight at making their acquaintance.

“Becoming aware of your situation,” said Mr. Clubb, “we preferred to report as quickly as we could.”

“Entirely commendable,” I said. “Will you gentlemen please sit down?”

“We prefer to stand,” said Mr. Clubb.

“I trust you will not object if I again take my chair,” I said, and did so. “To be honest, I am reluctant to describe the whole of my problem. It is a personal matter, therefore painful.”

“It is a domestic matter,” said Mr. Cuff.

I stared at him. He stared back with the sly imperturbability of his kind.

“Mr. Cuff,” I said, “you have made a reasonable and, as it happens, an accurate supposition, but in the future you will please refrain from speculation.”

“Pardon my plain way of speaking, sir, but I was not speculating,” he said. “Marital disturbances are domestic by nature.”

“All too domestic, one might say,” put in Mr. Clubb. “In the sense of pertaining to the home. As we have so often observed, you find your greatest pain right smack-dab in the living room, as it were.”

“Which is a somewhat politer fashion of naming another room altogether.” Mr. Cuff appeared to suppress a surge of barnie-glee.

Alarmingly, Charlie-Charlie had passed along altogether too much information, especially since the information in question should not have been in his possession. For an awful moment I imagined that the dismissed investigator had spoken to Charlie-Charlie. The man may have broadcast my disgrace to every person encountered on his final journey out of my office, inside the public elevator, thereafter even to the shoeshine ‘boys’ and cup-rattling vermin lining the streets. It occurred to me that I might be forced to have the man silenced. Symmetry would then demand the silencing of valuable Charlie-Charlie. The inevitable next step would resemble a full-scale massacre.

My faith in Charlie-Charlie banished these fantasies by suggesting an alternate scenario and enabled me to endure the next utterance.

Mr. Clubb said, “Which in plainer terms would be to say the bedroom.”

After speaking to my faithful spy, the Private Detectives Extraordinaire had taken the initiative by acting as if already employed and following Marguerite to her afternoon assignation at the ____________________ Hotel. Here, already, was the insubordination I had foreseen, but instead of the expected a

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I applaud your initiative.”

They stood at ease. “Then we have an understanding,” said Mr. Clubb. “At various times, various matters come to our attention. At these times we prefer to conduct ourselves according to the wishes of our employer, regardless of difficulty.”

“Agreed,” I said. “However, from this point forward I must insist-“

A rap at the door cut short my admonition. Mrs. Rampage brought in a coffeepot and cup, a plate beneath a silver cover, a rack with four slices of toast, two jam pots, silverware, a linen napkin, and a glass of water, and came to a halt some five or six feet short of the barnies. A sinfully arousing smell of butter and bacon emanated from the tray. Mrs. Rampage deliberated between placing my breakfast on the table to her left or venturing into proximity to my guests by bringing the tray to my desk. I gestured her forward, and she tacked wide to port and homed in on the desk. “All is in order, all is in train,” I said. She nodded and backed out-literally walked backwards until she reached the door, groped for the knob, and vanished.

I removed the cover from the plate containing two poached eggs in a cup-sized bowl, four crisp rashers of bacon, and a mound of home-fried potatoes all the more welcome for being a surprise gift from our chef.

“And now, fellows, with your leave I shall-“

For the second time my sentence was cut off in midflow. A thick barnie-hand closed upon the handle of the coffeepot and proceeded to fill the cup. Mr. Clubb transported my coffee to his lips, smacked appreciatively at the taste, then took up a toast slice and plunged it like a dagger into my eggcup, releasing a thick yellow suppuration. He crunched the dripping toast between his teeth.

At that moment, when mere a

“Here are our methods in action,” he said. “We prefer not to go hungry while you gorge yourself, speaking freely, for the one reason that all of this stuff represents what you ate every morning when you were a kid.” Leaving me to digest this shapeless utterance, he bit into his impromptu sandwich and sent golden-brown crumbs showering to the carpet.

“For as the important, abstemious man you are now,” said Mr. Clubb, “what do you eat in the mornings?”

“Toast and coffee,” I said. “That’s about it.”

“But in childhood?”

“Eggs,” I said. “Scrambled or fried, mainly. And bacon. Home fries too.” Every fatty, cholesterol-crammed ounce of which, I forbore to add, had been delivered by barnie-hands directly from barnie-farms. I looked at the rigid bacon, the glistening potatoes, the mess in the eggcup. My stomach lurched.