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 forseen, but instead of the expected annoyance I felt a thoroughgoing gratitude for the two men leaning slightly toward me, their animal senses alert to every nuance of my response. That they had come to my office armed with the essential secret absolved me from embarrassing explanations; blessedly, the hideous photographs would remain concealed in the bottom drawer.
“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 coffee pot 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 mid-flow. A thick barnie-hand closed upon the handle of the coffee pot 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 egg-cup, releasing a thick yellow suppuration. He crunched the dripping toast between his teeth.
At that moment, when mere annoyance passed into dumbfounded ire, I might have sent them packing despite my earlier resolution, for Mr Clubb’s violation of my breakfast was as good as an announcement that he and his partner respected none of the conventional boundaries and would indulge in boorish, even disgusting behavior. I very nearly did send them packing, and both of them knew it. They awaited my reaction, whatever it should be. Then I understood that I was being tested, and half of my insight was that ordering them off would be a failure of imagination. I had asked Charlie-Charlie to send me serious men, not Boy Scouts, and in the rape of my breakfast were depths and dimensions of seriousness I had never suspected. In that instant of comprehension, I believe, I virtually knew all that was to come, down to the last detail, and gave a silent assent. My next insight was that the moment when I might have dismissed these fellows with a conviction of perfect rectitude had just passed, and with the sense of opening myself to unpredictable adventures I turned to Mr Cuff. He lifted a rasher from my plate, folded it within a slice of toast, and displayed the result.
“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 egg-cup. My stomach lurched.
“We prefer,” Mr Clubb said, “that you follow your true preferences instead of muddying mind and stomach by gobbling this crap in search of a inner peace which never existed in the first place, if you can be honest with yourself.” He leaned over the desk and picked up the plate. His partner snatched a second piece of bacon and wrapped it within a second slice of toast. Mr Clubb began working on the eggs, and Mr Cuff grabbed a handful of home-fried potatoes. Mr Clubb dropped the empty egg cup, finished his coffee, refilled the cup, and handed it to Mr Cuff, who had just finished licking the residue of fried potato from his free hand.