I tucked the flagon under my elbow, pocketed the five or six cigars remaining in the humidor, and passed through Mrs. Rampage’s chamber. Hearing the abrasive music of the cleaners’ radios, I moved with exaggerated care down the corridor, darkened but for the light spilling from an open door thirty feet before me. Now and again, finding myself unable to avoid striking my shoulder against the wall, I took a medicinal swallow of genever. I drew up to the open door and realised that I had come to Gilligan’s quarters. The abrasive music emanated from his sound system. We’ll get rid of that, for starters, I said to myself, and straightened up for a dignified navigation past his doorway. At the crucial moment I glanced within to observe my jacketless junior partner sprawled, tie undone, on his sofa beside a scrawny ruffian with a quiff of lime-green hair and attired for some reason in a skintight costume involving zebra stripes and many chains and zippers. Disreputable creatures male and female occupied themselves in the background. Gilligan shifted his head, began to smile, and at the sight of me turned to stone.
“Calm down, Gilligan,” I said, striving for an impression of sober paternal authority. I had recalled that my junior had scheduled a late appointment with his most successful musician, a singer whose band sold millions of records year in and year out despite the absurdity of their name, the Dog Turds or the Rectal Valves, something of that sort. My calculations had indicated that Gilligan’s client, whose name I recalled as Cyril Futch, would soon become crucial to the maintenance of my firm, and as the beaky little rooster coldly took me in I thought to impress upon him the regard in which he was held by his chosen financial planning institution. “There is, I assure you, no need for alarm, no, certainly not, and in fact, Gilligan, you know, I should be honoured to seize this opportunity of making the acquaintance of your guest, whom it is our pleasure to assist and advise and whatever.”
Gilligan reverted to flesh and blood during the course of this utterance, which I delivered gravely, taking care to enunciate each syllable clearly in spite of the difficulty I was having with my tongue. He noted the bottle nestled into my elbow and the lighted cigar in the fingers of my right hand, a matter of which until that moment I had been imperfectly aware. “Hey, I guess the smoking lamp is lit,” I said. “Stupid rule anyhow. How about a little drink on the boss?”
Gilligan lurched to his feet and came reeling toward me.
All that followed is a montage of discontinuous imagery. I recall Cyril Futch propping me up as I communicated our devotion to the safeguarding of his wealth, also his dogged insistence that his name was actually Simon Gulch or Sidney Much or something similar before he sent me toppling onto the sofa; I see an odd little fellow with a tattooed head and a name like Pus (there was a person named Pus in attendance, though he may not have been the one) accepting one of my cigars and eating it; I remember inhaling from smirking Gilligan’s cigarette and drinking from a bottle with a small white worm lying dead at its bottom and snuffling up a white powder recommended by a female Turd or Valve; I remember singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ in a state of partial undress. I told a face brilliantly lacquered with makeup that I was “getting a feel” for “this music.” A female Turd or Valve, not the one who had recommended the powder but one in a permanent state of hilarity I found endearing, assisted me into my limousine and on the homeward journey experimented with its many buttons and controls. Atop the town-house steps, she removed the key from my fumbling hand gleefully to insert it into the lock. The rest is welcome darkness.
6.
A form of consciousness returned with a slap to my face, the muffled screams of the woman beside me, a bowler-hatted head thrusting into view and growling, “The shower for you, you damned idiot.” As a second assailant whisked her away, the woman, whom I thought to be Marguerite, wailed. I struggled against the man gripping my shoulders, and he squeezed the nape of my neck.
When next I opened my eyes, I was naked and quivering beneath an onslaught of cold water within the marble confines of my shower cabinet. Charlie-Charlie Rackett leaned against the open door of the cabinet and regarded me with ill-disguised impatience. “I’m freezing, Charlie-Charlie,” I said. “Turn off the water.”
Charlie-Charlie thrust an arm into the cabinet and became Mr. Clubb. “I’ll warm it up, but I want you sober,” he said. I drew myself up into a ball.
Then I was on my feet and moaning while I massaged my forehead. “Bath time all done now,” called Mr. Clubb. “Turn off the wa-wa.” I did as instructed. The door opened, and a bath towel unfurled over my left shoulder.
Side by side on the bedroom sofa dimly illuminated by the lamp, Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff observed my progress toward the bed. A black leather satchel stood on the floor between them. “Gentlemen,” I said, “although I cannot presently find words to account for the condition in which you found me, I trust that your good nature will enable you to overlook… or ignore… whatever it was that I must have done… I cannot quite recall the circumstances.”
“The young woman has been sent away,” said Mr. Clubb, “and you need never fear any trouble from that direction, sir.”
“The young woman?” I asked, and remembered a hyperactive figure playing with the controls in the back of the limousine. This opened up a fragmentary memory of the scene in Gilligan’s office, and I moaned aloud.
“None too clean, but pretty enough in a ragamuffin way,” said Mr. Clubb. “The type denied a proper education in social graces. Rough about the edges. Intemperate in language. A stranger to discipline.”
I groaned-to have introduced such a creature to my house!
“A stranger to honesty, too, sir, if you’ll permit me,” said Mr. Cuff. “It’s addiction turns them into thieves. Give them half a chance, they’ll steal the brass handles off their mothers’ coffins.”
“Addiction?” I said. “Addiction to what?”
“Everything, from the look of the bint,” said Mr. Cuff. “Before Mr. Clubb and I sent her on her way, we retrieved these items doubtless belonging to you, sir.” While walking toward me he removed from his pockets the following articles: my wristwatch, gold cuff links, wallet, the lighter of antique design given me by
Mr. Montfort d’M____________________, likewise the cigar cutter, and the last of the cigars I had purchased that day. “I thank you most gratefully,” I said, slipping the watch on my wrist and all else save the cigar into the pockets of my robe. It was, I noted, just past four o’clock in the morning. The cigar I handed back to him with the words “Please accept this as a token of my gratitude.”
“Gratefully accepted,” he said. Mr. Cuff bit off the end, spat it onto the carpet, and set the cigar alight, producing a nauseating quantity of fumes.
“Perhaps,” I said, “we might postpone our discussion until I have had time to recover from my ill-advised behaviour. Let us reconvene at…” A short period was spent pressing my hands to my eyes while rocking back and forth. “Four this afternoon?”