Murder For Revenge

Tottering toward the executive dining room, now and then I glanced into smoke-filled offices to observe my much-altered underlings. Some of them appeared, after a fashion, to be working. Several were reading paperback novels, which might be construed as work of a kind. One of the Captain’s assistants was unsuccessfully lofting paper airplanes toward his wastepaper basket. Gilligan’s secretary lay asleep on her office couch, and a records clerk lay sleeping on the file-room floor. In the dining room, Charlie-Charlie Rackett hurried forward to assist me to my accustomed chair. Gilligan and the Captain gave me sullen looks from their usual lunchtime station, an unaccustomed bottle of Scotch whiskey between them. Charlie-Charlie lowered me into my seat and said, “Terrible news about your wife, sir.”

“More terrible than you know,” I said.

Gilligan took a gulp of whiskey and displayed his middle finger, I gathered to me rather than Charlie-Charlie.

“Afternoonish,” I said.

“Very much so, sir,” said Charlie-Charlie, and bent closer to the brim of the Homburg and my ear. “About that little request you made the other day. The right men aren’t nearly so easy to find as they used to be, sir, but I’m still on the job.”

My laughter startled him. “No squab today, Charlie-Charlie. Just bring me a bowl of tomato soup.”

I had partaken of no more than two or three delicious mouthfuls when Gilligan lurched up beside me. “Look here,” he said, “it’s too bad about your wife and everything, I really mean it, honest, but that drunken act you put on in my office cost me my biggest client, not to forget that you took his girlfriend home with you.”

“In that case,” I said, “I have no further need of your services. Pack your things and be out of here by three o’clock.”

He listed to one side and straightened himself up. “You can’t mean that.”

“I can and do,” I said. “Your part in the grand design at work in the universe no longer has any co

“You must be as crazy as you look,” he said, and unsteadily departed.

I returned to my office and gently lowered myself into my seat. After I had removed my gloves and accomplished some minor repair work to the tips of my fingers with the tape and gauze pads thoughtfully inserted by the detectives into the pockets of my coat, I slowly drew the left glove over my fingers and became aware of feminine giggles amidst the coarser sounds of male amusement behind the screen. I coughed into the glove and heard a tiny shriek. Soon, though not immediately, a blushing Mrs. Rampage emerged from cover, patting her hair and adjusting her skirt. “Sir, I’m so sorry, I didn’t expect…” She was staring at my right hand, which had not as yet been inserted into its glove.

“Lawn-mower accident,” I said. “Mr. Gilligan has been released, and I should like you to prepare the necessary papers. Also, I want to see all of our operating figures for the past year, as significant changes have been dictated by the grand design at work in the universe.”

Mrs. Rampage flew from the room, and for the next several hours, as for nearly every remaining hour I spent at my desk on the Tuesdays and Thursdays thereafter, I addressed with a carefree spirit the details involved in shrinking the staff to the smallest number possible and turning the entire business over to the Captain. Graham Leeson’s abrupt disappearance greatly occupied the newspapers, and when not occupied as described I read that my archrival and competitor had been a notorious Don Juan, i.e., a compulsive womanizer, a flaw in his otherwise immaculate character held by some to have played a substantive role in his sudden absence. As Mr. Clubb had predicted, a clerk at the ____________________Hotel revealed Leeson’s sessions with my late wife, and for a time professional and amateur gossipmongers alike speculated that he had caused the disastrous fire. This came to nothing. Before the month had ended, Leeson sightings were reported in Monaco, the Swiss Alps, and Argentina, locations accommodating to sportsmen-after four years of varsity football at the University of Southern California, Leeson had won an Olympic silver medal in weight lifting while earning his MBA at Wharton.

In the limousine at the end of each day, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff braced me in happy anticipation of the lessons to come as we sped back through illusory sunlight toward the real darkness.

10. The Meaning of Tragedy

Everything, from the designs of the laughing gods down to the lowliest cells in the human digestive tract, is changing all the time, every particle of being large and small is eternally in motion, but this simple truism, so transparent on its surface, evokes immediate headache and stupefaction when applied to itself, not unlike the sentence “Every word that comes out of my mouth is a bald-faced lie.” The gods are ever laughing while we are always clutching our heads and looking for a soft place to lie down, and what I glimpsed in my momentary glimpses of the meaning of tragedy preceding, during, and after the experience of dental floss was so composed of paradox that I can state it only in cloud or vapour form, as:

The meaning of tragedy is: All is in order, all is in train.

The meaning of tragedy is: It only hurts for a little while.

The meaning of tragedy is: Change is the first law of life.

11.

So it took place that one day their task was done, their lives and mine were to move forward into separate areas of the grand design, and all that was left before preparing my own departure was to stand, bundled up against the nonexistent arctic wind, on the bottom step and wave farewell with my remaining hand while shedding buckets and bathtubs of tears with my remaining eye. Chaplinesque in their black suits and bowlers, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff ambled cheerily toward the glittering avenue and my bank, where arrangements had been made for the transfer into their hands of all but a small portion of my private fortune by my private banker, virtually his final act in that capacity. At the distant corner, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff, by then only tiny figures blurred by my tears, turned, ostensibly to bid farewell, actually, as I knew, to watch as I mounted my steps and went back within the house, and with a salute I honoured this last painful agreement between us.

A more pronounced version of the office’s metamorphosis had taken place inside my town house, but with the relative ease practice gives even to one whose step is halting, whose progress is interrupted by frequent pauses for breath and the passing of certain shooting pains, I skirted the mounds of rubble, the dangerous loose tiles and more dangerous open holes in the floor, the regions submerged underwater, and toiled up the resilient staircase, moved with infinite care across the boards bridging the former landing, and made my way into the former kitchen, where broken pipes and limp wires protruding from the lathe marked the sites of those appliances rendered pointless by the gradual disappearance of the household staff. (In a voice choked with feeling, Mr. Moncrieff, Reggie Moncrieff, Reggie, the last to go, had informed me that his last month in my service had been “as fine as my days with the duke, sir, every bit as noble as ever it was with that excellent old gentleman.”) The remaining cupboard yielded a flagon of genever, a tumbler, and a Montecristo torpedo, and with the tumbler filled and the cigar alight I hobbled through the devastated corridors toward my bed, there to gather my strengdh for the ardours of the coming day.

In good time, I arose to observe the final appointments of the life soon to be abandoned. It is possible to do up one’s shoelaces and knot one’s necktie as neatly with a single hand as with two, and shirt buttons eventually become a breeze. Into my travelling bag I folded a few modest essentials atop the flagon and the cigar box, and into a pad of shirts nestled the black Lucite cube prepared at my request by my instructor-guides and containing, mingled with the ashes of the satchel and its contents, the few bony nuggets rescued from Green Chimneys. The travelling bag accompanied me first to my lawyer’s office, where I signed papers making over the wreckage of the town house to the European gentleman who had purchased it sight unseen as a ‘fixer-upper’ for a fraction of its (considerably reduced) value. Next I visited the melancholy banker and withdrew the pittance remaining in my accounts. And then, glad of heart and free of all u