Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

‘So, kid,’ said I as I tipped him the wink, ‘what is it worries your mind?’

The guy sipped his bourbon and looked ill at ease, but ain’t that the way with the Brits? It was obvious to me from the start that getting the full story out of him was going to take some time. But I was prepared to take this time as I had to know all the facts. It is of the utmost importance to know all the facts. Facts are the lifeblood of a private eye. As would be a very small whip to a trainer of cheese. So I sat back and let him speak. I let him spill his beans.

‘I’m in no hurry,’ I told the guy. And anyhow I charge by the hour.

‘It is this way, Mr Woodbine, sir,’ said the kid, with respect in his voice. ‘I have become involved in something so strange, and indeed horrifying, that I hardly know where to begin. Corpses are being reanimated, imbued with souls that are not their own. A plan is afoot to destroy all life upon this world and reduce the planet to a Necrosphere. I have seen these undead with my own eyes and I am not the only one who has. In England an organisation that calls itself the Ministry of Serendipity is involved in the extermination of these undead creatures whenever it locates them. A gentleman called Mr Ishmael told me all about this. And there is something very wrong about this gentleman, but that is not why I am here.

‘Mr Woodbine, I am here to call upon your expertise. I wish to employ your services to investigate this matter, with a view to identifying the evil mastermind behind it.’

And I made the guy pause there. ‘Kid,’ I said to him. ‘Kid, did I just hear you use the words “evil mastermind”?’

‘That you did, Mr Woodbine, sir,’ said he.

I paused for a moment, in case he wished to add the words ‘Gawd strike me dead, guv’nor, if I’m telling you a porkie pie’ in that manner so favoured by the Brits. But as he did not, I spoke certain words of my own.

‘Kid,’ I said, ‘to use the downtown vernacular, you may well be blowing Dixie out of your ass, but if there is an evil mastermind involved, then you came a-knocking on the right detective’s door this brisk morning.’ And I topped up my glass and that of my client and let him go rambling on.

He was no literary eruditioner, like some of those famous Brits are. Your Walter Shakespeare, or your Guy Fawkes-Nights. But he could put his sentences together in the right order, and he kept his feet off my desk, so I kinda took a liking to the guy. Clearly he was suffering from a mental condition, chronic schizophrenia allied with an acute persecution complex resulting in audio/visual hallucinations, or was simply a fruitcake, as we in this town would say. But I liked the cut of his shoulders and as business was slack for the time of the year, what with most of the New York criminals being down in Miami at Crim-Con 69, I agreed to take the case and see which way it led.

‘Kid,’ I told the guy, ‘you may have bumblebees in your watering can, but who can say what your uncle keeps in his shed?’

The kid said, ‘Eh?’ But he knew what I meant. And I knew that he knew I knew.

‘So,’ said the guy, ‘what do we do next?’

‘We?’ I said. ‘We? Well, I’ll tell you what you do. You hoik your bankroll out and peel me off two hundred bucks.’

I noted a certain hesitation here, but I put this down to that British reticence and sexual repression that I’d heard so much about. From Fangio, who had once been to Brighton. At a barmans’ convention, Toot-Con 55. Fangio had sung the praises of the English women, whom, he claimed, rarely wore anything other than three trained ducks. And wellington boots for the rain.

The guy paid up front with two fifties, three twenties, two tens, four fives, nine ones and a three that I handed back to him. Those crazy Brits, eh, what do you make of them? And they say that they won the war.

‘Where to?’ asked the guy of me.

And I said, ‘Fangio’s Bar.’

Like I told the guy earlier, I work only the four locations. No genre detective worthy of his ACME sock-suspenders and patent-pending ball-and-socket truss needs more. And once I’d interviewed a client in my office, the next stop was always the bar. It can be any bar, let me be clear on that, but it must be a bar. It is the way things must be done, if they are to be done with style. And according to format.

I put the ‘GONE TO LUNCH’ sign on my door, although you wouldn’t have seen that because I do not work corridors, and moments later, as if through the means of a lap-dissolve, found myself in Fangio’s Bar.

As it was nearing lunchtime now, the joint was beginning to jump. The uptown chic in natty black and downtown noncer in beige. A cheese-trainer from Illinois, here searching for a venue for Cheese-Con 70. [21]A couple of Dacks, a McMurdo and a chim-chim-cheree-chim-cheroo. The McMurdo was sitting on my favourite bar stool, so he got the short shrift that was coming to him.

‘A bottle of Bud,’ I said to Fangio, the fat-boy barman. ‘And whatever my client here is having. And put it on my client’s tab, as soon as you’ve written one up.’

‘That all sounds rather complicated,’ said Fangio. ‘Would you care to run it by me again? Or perhaps not so much run as jog purposefully? ’

‘Not as such,’ I said to Fange. ‘Especially not on a day like this.’

‘This day is a new one on me,’ said the fat-boy, with wisdom. ‘And I’d just come to terms with yesterday when this one turns up and oh dear me.’ And he began to sob.

‘Do you need a hankie to dry those tears?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ said Fange. ‘I have a hankie of my own.’

‘Then stick it in your mouth and bring us over two Buds.’

‘I’d quite like to try a cocktail,’ said the young guy called Tyler as he leaned upon the bar counter and ogled the ashtrays in the way that strangers so often do.

‘Don’t get me going on cocktails,’ said Fangio, weeping away like a woebegone woman bewailing a badly drawn boy.

‘Two Buds,’ I said, using the natural authority that God in His infinite wisdom had seen fit to grant me.

‘Coming right up, sir,’ said the barman.

‘Might I ask you something, Mr Woodbine?’ said the guy.

I nodded in the affirmative. ‘Not now, kid,’ I said.

‘But it’s important. Please.’

‘Well, all right. Go on. And don’t feel that you have to rush yourself. ’

‘All this talking of the toot – it really does help you to solve your cases?’

That was some question and I was the fella to answer it.

‘Kid,’ I said. ‘Kid, over the years Fange and I have talked a great deal of toot in this bar. We talk the toot and we chew the fat.’ And as it was nearing lunchtime, I dipped into the complimentary bowl upon the bartop and helped myself to a prize gobbet of said chewing-fat. ‘It’s the way things are done, kid,’ I continued, munching as I did. ‘You might argue that it is a tradition, or an old charter, or something. But I would argue that it ain’t nothing of the sort. It’s more of a dynamic symbiosis. Or, more rightly, a symbiotic dynamic. You can’t squeeze salt from a billiard ball, no matter how long you soak it.’

The guy looked thoughtful and nodded his head. ‘Right,’ said he. ‘So all this talking of the toot – it really does help you to solve your cases?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Here’s our beers. And Fangio’s brought your tab.’

‘I’m not sure that it really is a tab,’ said the fat-boy, presenting us with two glasses of cherry brandy. ‘It looks more to me to be something connected with golf. A tee, possibly, or a five-iron-gone-apeshit-crazy. ’

I gave the item he’d brought out a stern looking-over. ‘Nope,’ I said, in the negative. ‘That’s a bar tab all right. See the words “BAR TAB” printed at the top? That’s your guide to its correct identification, right up there in lights, as it were.’