Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

Fridge-light fell on the scuffed toes of his shoes. He remembered this later. What would his sharp-eyed counterparts say? Falling apart. He wondered why he hadn’t buffed the black brogues with the lanolin-impregnated sponge that was resting on a shelf in the wardrobe. In all likelihood. Why he hadn’t opened the doors and drawers, looking for things disturbingly ordinary. Haunting in their ordinariness. A loose thread in the trouser press, a dead bulb in the reading lamp. A careless Detective is a dead Detective.

He took the room-service menu from the dresser and sat again on the bed. On the cover of the menu was a lion licking its paw. He had seen that somewhere before. He opened the menu and looked at the prices. Exorbitant. He was a poor Detective, that was one thing he was sure of. A down-at-heel gumshoe. He was not travelling on an expense account, did not fly business class, did not have pals who could lay on the Johnnie Walker Blue.

Penniless. He put the menu aside and began to open the doors of the wardrobe until he found the one with the mirror. He looked at his mouth as he said: Penurious. Impecunious. Parsimonious . In what damp recess of my mind have these words incubated? He turned his head one way and another. The brow: high this way, middle that. The mouth: small and pinched, broad and smiling. There are two sides to every story, coin, playing card, seven-single, football match, tango.

Detectives at leisure. Tanned Americans with their pockets full of beachsand, pale Swedes tramping snow up the stairs, Australians fragrant with sunblock SPF 30+. De Lange: Never trust a Detective with his own motorboat. True. But there is more to life than Detection. Even the poorest practitioner needs to get his mind off the job. He considered the hobbies: poker, polo, needlepoint, marathon running, chess, snorkelling, traditional Irish fiddle music, angling, philately, taxidermy, radio-controlled model aircraft, the cult of the budgerigar.

It surfaced in his mind like a bubble from a severed air line. 101 Detectives: Cancún. The pointless rigmarole of introduction — Hello, my name is Carlos and I’m a Detective — when every one of them was undercover. That clown Tobias from Frankfurt had swallowed a contact lens on the plane and was edgy. And then Aliber who was running the show brought in the sniffer dog, an overexcitable German shepherd, for some party game or other and Tobias went ballistic.

Odd how the drinkers always banded together. When everyone else had gone to bed, the Protestants would be trying to drink the Catholics under the table. In Detective World, as in any other, like sought like. The costive sleuths of Scandinavian extraction and logical bent (Gustaf Magnusson, Magnus Andersson, Anders Gustafsson) smuggled their home-baked rye and fermented fish into the breakfast room. Even the Lutheran haemophiliac had company, an agnostic bleeder from Skipton who had met the Yorkshire Ripper.

Why did he keep coming to these things? He always went away saying: Never again. And then a new summons came, in serial-killer typography, on the back of a handbill for homeopathic remedies, pinned under the wiper blade of the Ford Bantam in the dead of night, in mirror script, in red lipstick on the bathroom cabinet, in schoolgirl Mandarin, on a yellow Post-it stuck to a brick, lobbed through a window. The marketing people never gave up.

And neither should he. Perhaps it was the friendship that kept him coming back, the fellowship, the camaraderie. Only a Detective knew what another Detective went through. Only another Detective understood what went into casing the joint, tracing the movement, combing the printout, testing the hypothesis, cracking the code, wearing the wire, calling for backup, taking the fall, cleaning the wound, typing the report, citing the reference. No explanations were needed, just a cast in the eye.

He had his connections, his 101 crew. At every Meet and Greet there were one or two nearly familiar characters. Chums. He would scour their craggy features for clues while they punched his shoulder or smell their receding hairlines when they leant in close for a battering embrace. What was that oceanic note? Norwegian salmon? Guatemalan devilfish? Herring. It brought back 101 Detectives: Den Haag. Better say nothing. Taciturn was also a style. Perhaps even his.

He should analyse these over-friendly colleagues. A common denominator might help him find his place in Detective World. A pattern. He conjured up a face, Chief Inspector Connell of the Gorbals, but all that came back was the mutton-chop whiskers. And then, unbidden, the loose-limbed frame of Dr Louella Scarlozzi, followed by the ethanol undertone of her handcream. Once, when she’d opened her handbag to look for her shades, a rubber glove had fallen out.

Suddenly he missed his wife. He was a married Detective. That was one thing he was sure of. One whose wife and kids had paid the price for his work. Whose wife had stuck by him through thick and thin. Mostly thin. The world was full of angry divorced Detectives, whose wives kept the kids away from them, and bitter bachelor Detectives who spent their nights in bars. He was not one of those.

He missed his kids. Little Davy who wanted to be a Detective like his dad. Little Sookie the jolly little June bug who was having trouble learning to read. Little Okefenokee who could play Wagner on the pennywhistle. Not-so-little Lilo who could count to leventy-leven on her thumbs. Lovable little scallywags. He should take them all something. Something better than a last-minute box of Smarties from the Duty Free on his way home.

He shut the wardrobe and opened the minibar. The Toblerone was exorbitant and calorific, but no one was counting. He pushed the bar out of the cardboard wrapper with his forefinger, peeled away the silver foil, snapped off three blocks and put them in his mouth. They were cold. He pressed them against his palate with his tongue. Swiss design. Very odd, he thought. Like eating the spine of a chocolate mammal.

A bittersweet prospect: Joseph Blumenfeld, Morbidly Obese Detective. Confined to bed in his spongebobbed room, conducting his business from a wireless bellytop nested in the flab, sausage fingers flying. Cut off from the hurly-burly and therefore even better suited to being a Detective. Strange to say. He pushed another five vertebrae into his mouth. He could pile on the pounds. There was still time, if he put his mouth to it.

Many things had been sent to try a Detective over the years: opium addiction, alcoholism, blindness, Catholicism, melancholia, loss of limb, obsessive compulsion, motion sickness, hydrophobia, lycanthropy, lack of stature, tone deafness. No burden was so great it could not be turned to account. Who was he to complain about a mild case of panic disorder, high cholesterol levels and subcutaneous acne? No one’s feet are exactly the same size.

The world was his oyster. And yet there were many kinds of Detective he would never be. He would never be a terribly black Detective, no matter how hard he practised. He would not even be a convincing African Detective. Not that the idea appealed much. People asked too many questions, there were too many forms to complete. Better to be a Detective of the World. Of Detective World.

Chances of being a lady Detective were nearly zero. No ma’am, he would never be such. Disadvantaged Detective? Zero. Persecuted Detective? Less than. He would not flee atrocities or overcome obstacles. Not really. He would never be a lesbian Muslim Detective of Turkish origins. Not in a month of Sundays. Resident in Kreuzberg. No ways. With one eye. Fuck that. Mother with Alzheimer’s. What’s the matter with you?

It was sad. But lodged in that sad, like a slug in a gut, was a lump of joy. A wingnut in a sausage roll? There was comfort in the narrowing of possibility and there was freedom in restraint. He would never be a retired prize-winning jockey Detective, bones were too big. But it was not too late for riding lessons, if he could overcome his hippophobia.