Ivan Vladislavic - 101 Detectives

Shit, shave and shampoo, as they say in the service. Let’s do it! Chop chop. Before he stepped into the cubicle, he hung his linen jacket on the towel rail. When — if — he hit the Meet and Greet later, he would be professionally crumpled or not at all. De Lange: Never trust a Detective with creases in his pants and none in his jacket. Damn straight.

He shouldered the door and thumbed the lug until the jet was scalding. He felt his lethargy burning off, sluiced away over belly and thigh, going down the tubes with suds and musk-scented conditioner from the little lab specimen bottles. He flew down the pipe where sludge and sewerage and scum were caulked like hives. He let go laziness, fancy, illusion. All ears. Totally nose.

Then he palmed off the spume and grubbed the flange until the jet grew icy. He mugged up to the stream. His nerves jangled through. Now he manned up and hunkered down and so forth. Drying off, double time, vigilance rose to the skin. Dress for the occasion, it says on the label. Costume is crucial and so are prepositions. He remembered this later.

There was a towelling dressing gown on a hook in the wardrobe and he put it on. An embroidered crest over the heart showed a lion rampant, licking its paw. It came back to him now. Towelling slippers too. He snuggled his feet into them and wriggled his toes. Comfy. Verbs ending in — uggle and — iggle. He thought about that. Nothing escaped him.

Plan for the worst-case scenario, as it says in the manual. In every cockamamie manual between here and Timbuctoo or maybe Poughkeepsie. Somewhere else’s somewhere else. His language was acting up and it scared him. No argument. Cellophane? He hooked it out from under the bed with a wire coathanger: the slim plastic wrapper from an individually wrapped toothpick. He bagged it.

Then he went to the window, kinked one blade of the venetian blind with his forefinger, and brought his eye close. The parking lot was a sticky plate of black gumbo and yellow herringbones. There was just one car down there in a viscous smear of sunlight, a late model Subaru with snowchains on the tyres. A small herd of zebra.

For a moment he thought it was the hire-car he had driven in from the airport. But that was 101 Detectives: Yellow River. They run into one another if you fail to keep the edges straight. Now he remembered the bus ride, men with machetes slashing the fenders, rocks bouncing off the hood. Burning tyres. Sub-Saharan Africa, man! Bang bang.

He stood there for a long time, looking down on the lot, until the tip of his finger grew numb. The windows of the car were misted over, he thought, as if someone was in there breathing. The sun dropped. The shadow of the lodge seeped out towards the Subaru like a pool of blood from a gut-shot motherfucker.

He looked for words. For a precise phrase to make something happen. Here he comes now. No. Here come trouble. Who the hell speaks like that? What have we here. No, it was all wrong. Fuck me George. Better. Sonofabitch. One word. That’s the ticket, trick, technique. Few words as possible. Fuck. Hey. Yo. But no one came.

He kicked off the slippers. He was feeling more precise again, calibrated, indexed. He paced out the distance from door to window, heel to toe, and wrote the number on the leaflet. The question snagged his eye again: How toxic are you? He should have followed his father’s advice and become a pharmacist. Or a quantity surveyor.

Then again he would bet a pound to a pinch of table salt that every second quantity surveyor wished he was a Detective. People thought Detective World was glamorous, they thought it was all cocktails and cadavers. They had no idea how hard it was. All the quirks had been taken. That was half the problem.

Say he learnt to play the ukulele. He could be the music-making, mountain-climbing Detective. Then one fine day, as he toiled up to base camp, it would come on the breeze: Follow every rainbow… Yep, that broad with the banjo, who was climbing the third-highest peak on every continent, had beaten him to it.

Then again he loved card tricks and newsprint and foreign tongues. He could fold newsbills into pigeons, he could pull pidgins out of a hat. What would take you further in Detective World? he wondered. Mumbo-jumbo or hocus-pocus? Mumbo-pocus! Be paper-foldy, magic-makey Detective. Jolly-fine day, come by base camp, who dat? Kumbaya my Lord.

He thought about Polkinghorn, the Detective’s Detective, who had the earbud franchise. The Polkster, the Hornster, the Budster. Many affectionate nicknames ending with — ster. He was 101-Detectives-in-one. When he fell off the paddywagon and broke his panama there wasn’t a dry eye in Detective World. All buds to every body. And vice versa.

Loved a corpse outlined in chalk on the living-room floor. Every home should have one, a dead thing, a visual effect, a body of evidence. If only there were enough of them to supply the demand. There were never enough victims to go round. The Polksters were arm-wrestling the Hornsters for cadavers.

Four thirty already! The second hand swept past with its fist clenched. He thought too much and did too little. A Detective had to strike a balance between thought and action or be carried off in mid-deduction before his work was done. All the great Detectives were dead before their time.

All the great Detectives are dead full stop. Or so it seemed to him. He called them to mind, the gentlemen with meerschaum pipes and watchchains, in their trenchcoats and fedoras, their chequered vests and pasts. Flaws were grander back then, but more forgivable; quirks were truer and more endearing.

The moderns had no manners, no sense of decorum or shame. They were far too concerned with wounds. Their minds were narrow and their mouths were foul. Motherfucker this and cocksucker that. Their flaws were pathologies, their quirks were disorders. You could hardly tell the Detectives from the non-.

Everybody is a Detective now, everybody and his brother. That’s the other half of the problem, he thought. Wherever you go, you trip over a Detective, peering under a bed or crouched behind a bush, bristling with equipment, probing and prodding, and dabbing to see if it glows.

They’re over-equipped, under-trained and ill-mannered. Case in point: Detective Spivis of 101 Detectives: Baden-Württemberg with his Iron Maiden T-shirt and his thick-lipped trainers. Tossing peanuts into his mouth from an unsalted stash in a moonbag. Talking in monosyllables at the Meet and Greet. One of the boys.

To think that this slob with a ring through his eyebrow is top dog of Detective World. He has a loft in the city and a cabin in the woods, but he winters in the South of France. Changes his address more often than his socks.

Then the sayings of De Lange chided him. This one in particular: Detection is its own reward. The maestro was right, he thought, envy is unseemly in a Detective. So what if there are too many files on your desk. It comes with the territory.

He should get on with it. He had earbuds, he had tweezers, he had a little torch. He had a dozen bottles with childproof lids. He should swab something and see if it changed colour. Stub the lug, rootle it down in the grab-bag.

He dug this snub-nosed lingo slubbing out of his pug-ugly mug. It was good. It was endings in — ub and — ug. He could get a grip on stuff with it. Solve shit. Make some moves he needed to get down in Detective World.

Always be first at the scene of the accident, quick through the barricades, flashing your face like a badge. Always be first at the buffet, nosing the canapés, tossing them back by the fistful. Never be first at the Meet and Greet.

Meeting and greeting. His heart sank at the thought. Of course, it would be the usual free-for-all. Whose serial killer had more notches on his prosthesis, whose molester was more perverse, whose victim had more Facebook friends, whose perp was trending.