Robert Rankin - Necrophenia

‘Don’t get me going on tweed jacket elbow patches,’ said Fangio.

‘I won’t, my friend,’ I told him.

‘But this is free love,’ said Mama Cass. ‘It’s not like real love. In fact, it doesn’t really have anything to do with love at all, really. It’s more about meaningless sex. It just sounds nicer to call it free love. It’s one of those new buzz words, like Flower Power, that the Big Apple Corporation create.’

‘The Big Apple Corporation?’ I questioned.

‘The BAC, that’s right.’

‘Pray tell me, madam,’ I asked of her, ‘what do you know of this uptown organisation?’

‘Not very much,’ said Mama Cass. And she took the cherry brandy from my client’s hand and quaffed it away at a gulp. ‘They’re behind the Woodstock Festival. Although they’re very secretive about it and not many people know. I just happened to overhear a conversation that Mr Ishmael was having.’

‘That name again,’ said I. ‘Who is this Mr Ishmael?’

‘The backer of Woodstock. The chairman of the Big Apple Corporation.’

‘This is news to me,’ said the guy.

‘Be still,’ I said. And I meant it. And I showed him that I did.

‘Mr Ishmael is the driving force behind the BAC,’ continued the ample diva. ‘And it was the BAC that came up with not only Free Love and Flower Power, but Peace and Love, Man also. And a good thing, too, because if the BAC hadn’t got the Flower Power thing going, me and my band could never have found a record label to take our stuff.’

‘You’re on Dunhill, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘It’s Mr Ishmael’s label really. But I must be going. I need to find a phone.’

‘It’s very cold out,’ I said to the girl with the golden voice. ‘What say you and I sit here and sink a few Buds, chew the fat and talk about the good old days.’

‘You mean memories? Misty watercolour memories?’

‘The very same. Can I buy you a beer? My client there is paying.’

‘The young guy lying on the floor next to the McMurdo?’

‘The very same.’ And I hailed Fangio. ‘We need some service over here,’ I hailed. ‘And none of your service-with-a-smile-without-the-smile. ’

‘I missed his earlier smile,’ said Mama Cass, ‘because it was before I came in. But I just bet it brought joy to the world, for it certainly did to me.’

‘Sister,’ I said to her, ‘you know how to talk the toot. Let’s crack a bottle of bubbly.’

I ordered that bottle and by three of the clock that ticks out the afternoon it was delivered to us, along with a bar tab that I signed on my client’s behalf and a kitten that I petted gently and returned to Fange. Who placed it in a cardboard box to be mailed to our boys in ’ Nam.

I filled glasses and toasts were exchanged.

‘I have a black eye,’ said my client, rising unsteadily from the floor and viewing this in the mirror behind the bar.

‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said.

Fangio excused himself from a crowd of Jimbos who had recently entered the bar and returned himself to my company.

‘What very big women,’ he said. ‘And such deep voices. And they smell a bit iffy, too.’

I noticed my client glance over his shoulder.

‘Are you okay, buddy?’ I asked him.

‘Jimbos,’ said my client. ‘I told you about them. At The Green Carnation Club. I think they might be undead.’

‘But you can’t tell for sure because you’re not on the drug, right?’

‘Right,’ said the guy. ‘And that wasn’t funny, what you said earlier. You weren’t in the green room at The Stones in the Park gig. I would have seen you.’

‘But you did,’ I told him. ‘I was in disguise.’

‘As what?’

‘As whom. As Marianne Faithfull.’

‘I think I’m drunk,’ said the guy. ‘I don’t believe you actually said that.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Just keep telling yourself I didn’t.’

‘And add I must pay Fangio’s bar tab,’ said Fangio. ‘And, a little while later, when we’re all very drunk, you can sing us a song, also.’

‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I’ve been sitting around here for hours now, drinking and lying on the floor unconscious also, although I don’t remember how that happened. And I’m beginning to believe that Mr Woodbine here is just treading water, as it were, because he is being paid by the hour.’

Things went suddenly quiet in the bar. And outside the sun went behind a cloud and a dog howled in the distance. Same sun. Different dog.

Fangio broke the sudden quiet. ‘Out of my bar,’ cried he.

‘Out?’ said the guy.

‘Out indeed. Coming in here with your beguiling gypsy ways, disguised as a Swiss abortionist. I can stand just so much and then no more. Like Popeye. And he’s a sailor!’

‘But I’m the client,’ said the guy. ‘If you chuck me out then Mr Woodbine won’t have a case to work on. And I won’t come back and pay my bar tab.’

‘You fiend in human form,’ quoth Fangio. ‘Are there any Cosa Nostra in the bar? I must have this man killed.’

‘Let’s all stop there,’ I said, as ever the voice of reason. ‘We have all had something to drink and Mr Tyler, being a Brit, cannot be expected to either hold his drink or enjoy the benefits of the American dental system.’

‘What?’ asked the guy.

‘And I,’ I said, ‘feel that I am perched upon the threshold of a major breakthrough in the case. I am only moments away from this breakthrough and I for one would not wish to be denied this breakthrough, as the repercussions for the case – and in fact for humanity as a whole – are too horrendous even to contemplate.’

‘You don’t say?’ said Fangio.

‘Oh yes I do.’

Fangio grinned and said, ‘Oh no you don’t.’

‘Oh yes I do.’

‘Oh no you don’t.’ And Fangio laughed.

‘Have to stop you there,’ I said.

‘But-’ said the guy. But I had to stop him, too.

‘A major breakthrough is coming,’ I said, ‘so let us not mess with the method. Mama Cass, is there anything else that you would like to tell me regarding Mr Ishmael and the Big Apple Corporation?’

‘I can’t think of anything,’ said Mama Cass.

‘Think very very hard.’

And Mama Cass thought hard. ‘There is one thing,’ she said. ‘It seemed a trivial thing at the time, but the more I think about it, and I often do, I think that it might mean something.’

‘Would you care to whisper it into my ear?’ I asked Mama Cass.

‘I certainly would,’ said she.

And Mama Cass whispered. And I listened hard to his whispering. And my client tried to listen too, but he couldn’t hear because Mama Cass was whispering.

And when her whispering was done, she stopped whispering.

‘Your words are sweet soul music to my ears, Mama Cass,’ I told her.

‘You think it means something?’ she asked.

‘It has the case all but solved.’

‘Case?’ said Mama Cass. ‘What case?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘A trivial matter. But let us talk about us. You are a fine-looking woman, and I a virile man. What say we jump into the back of your limo and get our rocks off?’

And Mama Cass cried, ‘Look, Zulus, thousands of them,’ and pointed, and I peered in the direction of this pointing. And then she hit me hard on the back of the head. And I felt myself falling, down, down into a whirling black pit of oblivion.

And right on cue, at the end of the chapter, which worked out perfectly.

Frankly, I could do without the blow to the back of my head and the long and horrid fall into that whirling black pit of oblivion, which I always have to take at the end of chapter two in every adventure I have. Frankly, and I use that word again and advisedly, I wish that there was some other way to expedite matters with the dame that does me wrong. Because, frankly, it gives me a headache. But for we genre detectives, the tried and trusty methods are the ones that get the job done. So I guess that you just gotta take the knocks along with the good times and never say die. And never ever change format.