“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.
She raised her other eyebrow as well.
“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?”
“Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow. What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing. Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.
He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.
He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I ...”
“Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”
“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.
“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually survive a good fling at the wall.”
“What?” said Dirk.
“I mean that however respectable your business may be, if it was actually respected you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”
Dirk had no idea what had happened to the other chair in his office, but he certainly wasn’t going to admit it.
“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am not going to look for your lost cat.”
“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly ...”
“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”
Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an “I don’t care what I wear, just any old thing that’s lying around” kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around. She was obviously pretty bright, probably had a pretty good job, like running some sort of major textile or telecommunications company despite being clearly only thirty-two. In other words, she was exactly the sort of person who didn’t mislay cats, and certainly didn’t go running off to poky little private detective agencies if she did. He felt ill at ease.
“Talk sense, please,” he said sharply. “My time is valuable.”
“Oh yes? How valuable?”
She looked scornfully around his office. He had to admit to himself that it was grim, but he was damned if he was just going to sit there and take it. Just because he needed the work, needed the money, had nothing better to do with his time, there was no reason for anybody to think that he was at the beck and call of every good-looking woman who walked into his office offering to pay for his services. He felt humiliated.
“I’m not talking about my scale of fees, though it is, I promise you, awesome. I was merely thinking of time passing. Time that won’t pass this way again.”
He leaned forward in a pointed manner.
“Time is a finite entity, you know. Only about four billion years to go till the sun explodes. I know it seems like a lot now, but it will soon go if we just squander it on frivolous nonsense and small talk.”
“Small talk! This is half of my cat we’re talking about!”
“Madam, I don’t know who this ‘we’ is that you are referring to, but ...”
“Listen. You may choose, when you’ve heard the details of this case, not to accept it because it is, I admit, a little odd. But I made an appointment to see you on the basis of what it said in your advertisement, to whit, that you find lost cats, and if you turn me down solely on the basis that you do not find lost cats, then I must remind you that there is such a thing as the Trades Descriptions Act. I can’t remember exactly what it says, but I bet you five pounds it says you can’t do that.”
Dirk sighed. He picked up a pencil and pulled a pad of paper towards him.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll take down the details of the case.”
“Thank you.”
“And then I’ll turn it down.”
“That’s your business.”
“The point I’m trying to make,” said Dirk, “is that it isn’t. So. What is this cat’s name?”
“Gusty.”
“Gusty.”
“Yes. Short for Gusty Winds.”
Dirk looked at her. “I won’t ask,” he said.
“You’ll wish you had.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
She shrugged.
“Male?” said Dirk. “Female?”
“Male.”
“Age?”
“Four years.”
“Description?”
“Well, um. That’s a bit tricky.”
“How hard can a question be? What is he, black? White? Ginger? Tabby?”
“Oh. Siamese.”
“Good,” said Dirk, writing down “Siamese.” “And when did you last see him?”
“About three minutes ago.”
Dirk laid his pencil down and looked at her.
“Maybe four, in fact,” she added.
“Let me see if I understand you,” said Dirk. “You say you lost your cat, er, ‘Gusty,’ while you’ve been standing here talking to me?”
“No. I lost him—or sort of half-lost him—two weeks ago. But I last saw him, which is what you asked, just before I came into your office. I just checked to see he was okay. Which he was. Well, sort of okay. If you can call it okay.”
“And ... er, where was he, exactly, when you checked to see that he was okay?”
“In his basket. Shall I bring him in? He’s just out here.”
She went out of the room and returned with a medium-sized wickerwork cat box. She put it down on Dirk’s desk. Its contents mewed slightly. She closed the door behind her.
Dirk frowned.
“Excuse me if I’m being a little obtuse,” he said, looking round the basket at her. “Tell me which bit of this I’ve got wrong. It seems to me that you are asking me if I will exercise my professional skills to search for and if possible find and return to you a cat ...”
“Yes.”
“... which you already have with you in a cat basket?”
“Well, that’s right up to a point.”
“And which point is that?”
“Have a look for yourself.”
She slid out the metal rod that held the lid in place, reached into the basket, lifted out the cat, and put him down on Dirk’s desk, next to the basket.
Dirk looked at him.
He—Gusty—looked at him.
There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has accidentally walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with this feeling.
Gusty looked at Dirk and clearly found
him reprehensible in some way. He turned away, yawned, stretched, groomed his whiskers briefly, licked down a small patch of ruffled fur, then leapt lightly off the table and started carefully to examine a splinter of floorboard, which he found to be far more interesting than Dirk.
Dirk stared wordlessly at Gusty.
Up to a point, Gusty looked exactly like a normal Siamese cat. Up to a point. The point up to which Gusty looked like a normal Siamese cat was his waist, which was marked by a narrrow, cloudy grey band.
“The front half looks quite well,” said Melinda whatever-her-name-was in a small voice. “Quite sleek and healthy, really.”
“And the back half?” said Dirk.
“Is what I want you to look for.”
Beyond the grey, cloudy band there was nothing. The cat’s body simply stopped dead in midair. Everything below approximately the ninth rib was, well, absent.
The odd thing about this was that the cat seemed quite unaffected. This is not to suggest that he had learnt to live with his sad affliction, or that he was courageously making the best things. He was, quite simply, unaffected. He didn’t seem to notice. Not content with ignoring the normal requirements of biology, the cat was also in clear breach of the laws of physics. He moved, jumped, promenaded, sat, in exactly the same way as if his rear half were present.
“It isn’t invisible,” said Melinda, picking the cat up, awkwardly. “It’s actually not there.” She passed her hand back and forth through clear air, where the cat’s hindquarters should have been. The cat twisted and turned in her grip, mewling crossly, then leapt nimbly to the ground and stalked about in an affronted manner.
“My, my,” said Dirk, steepling his fingers under his chin. “That is odd.”
“You’ll take the case?”
“No,” said Dirk. He pushed the pad of paper away from him. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t be doing this sort of stuff. If there’s anything I want less than to find a cat, it’s to find half a cat. Suppose I was unfortunate enough to find it. What then? How am I supposed to go about sticking it on? I’m sorry, but I’m through with cats, and I am definitely through with anything that even smacks of the supernatural or paranormal. I’m a rational being, and I ... excuse me.” The phone was ringing. Dirk answered it. He sighed. It was Thor, the ancient Norse God of Thunder. Dirk knew immediately it was him from the long, portentous silence and the low grumblings of irritation followed by strange, distant bawling noises. Thor did not understand phones very well. He would usually stand ten feet away and shout godlike commands at them. This worked surprisingly well as far as making the connection was concerned, but made actual conversation well-nigh impossible.
Thor had moved in with an American girl of Dirk’s acquaintance, and Dirk understood from the strange Icelandic proclamations echoing over the line that he, Dirk, was supposed to be turning up for tea that afternoon.
Dirk said that, yes, he knew that, that he would be there at about five, was looking forward to it and would see him later; but Thor, of course, could hear none of this from where he was standing, and was beginning to get angry and shout a lot.
Dirk had at last to give up and hesitantly put the phone down, hoping that Thor would not do too much damage in Kate’s small flat. She had, he knew, managed to persuade the big god to try to crush packets of crisps in his rages rather than actual sofas and motorbikes, but it was sometimes touch-and-go when he really couldn’t get the hang of what was going on.
Dirk felt oppressed. He looked up. Oh yes.
“No,” he said. “Go away. I can’t deal with any more of this stuff.”
“But, Mr. Gently, I hear you have something of a reputation in this area.”
“And that’s precisely what I want to get rid of. So please get out of here and take your bifurcated feline with you.”
“Well, if that’s your attitude ...”
She picked up the cat basket and sauntered out. The half-cat made a pretty good go of sauntering out as well.
Dirk sat at his desk and simmered for a minute or two, wondering why he was so out of sorts today. Looking out of his window, he saw the extremely attractive and intriguing client he had just rudely turned away out of sheer grumpiness. She looked particularly gorgeous and alluring as she hurried across the road towards a black London taxicab.
He hurried to the window and wrenched it up. He leant out.
“I suppose dinner’s out of the question, then?” he yelled.
Chapter 3
“You just missed Thor, I’m afraid,” said Kate Schechter. “He suddenly went off in a fit of Nordic angst about something or other.”
She waved a hand vaguely at the gaping, jagged hole in the window that overlooked Primrose Hill. “Probably gone to the zoo to stare at elks again. He’ll turn up again in a few hours, full of beer and remorse and carrying a large pane of glass that won’t fit. So he’ll then get upset about that and break something else.”
“We had a bit of a misunderstanding on the phone, I’m afraid,” said Dirk. “But I don’t really know how to avoid them.”
“You can’t,” said Kate. “He’s not a happy god. It’s not his world. Never will be, either.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Oh, there’s plenty to do. Just repairing things keeps me busy.”
It wasn’t what Dirk meant, but he realised she knew that and didn’t probe. She went into the kitchen to fetch the tea at that point anyway. He subsided into an elderly armchair and peered around the small flat. He noticed that there was now quite a collection of books on Norse mythology stacked on Kate’s desk, all sprouting numerous bookmarks and annotated record cards. She was obviously doing her best to master the situation. But one book, buried about four inches into the wall, and obviously flung there by superhuman force, gave some idea of the sort of difficulties she was up against.
“Don’t even ask,” she said, when she returned bearing tea. “Tell me what’s going on with you instead.”
“I did something this afternoon,” he said, stirring the pale, sickly tea and suddenly remembering that, of course, Americans had no idea how to make it, “that was incredibly stupid.”
“I thought you seemed a bit grim.”
“Probably the cause rather than the effect. I’d had an appalling week, plus I had indigestion, and I suppose it made me a bit ...”
“Don’t tell me. You met a very attractive and desirable woman and were incredibly pompous and rude to her.”
Dirk stared at her. “How did you know that?” he breathed.
“You do it all the time. You did it to me.”
“I did not!” protested Dirk.
“You certainly did!”
“No, no, no.”
“I promise you, you ...”
“Hang on,” interrupted Dirk. “I remember now. Hmm. Interesting. And you’re saying I do that all the time?”
“Maybe not all the time. Presumably you have to get some sleep occasionally.”
“But you claim that, typically, I’m rude and pompous to attractive women?”
He wrestled his way up out of the armchair and fished around in his pocket for a notebook.
“I didn’t mean you to get quite so serious about it, it’s not exactly a major ... well, now I come to think about it I suppose it probably is a major character flaw. What are you doing?”
“Oh, just making a note. Odd thing about being a private detective—you spend your time finding out little things about other people that nobody else knows, but then you discover that there are all sorts of things that everybody else knows about you, which you don’t. For instance, did you know that I walk in an odd way? A kind of strutting waddle, someone described it as.”
“Yes, of course I do. Everybody who knows you knows that.”
“Except me, you see,” said Dirk. “Now that I know I’ve been trying to catch myself at it as I walk past shop windows. Doesn’t work, of course. All I ever see is myself frozen mid-stride with one foot in the air and gaping like a
fish. Anyway, I’m drawing up a little list, to which I have now added, ‘Am always extremely rude and pompous to attractive women.’”
Dirk stood and looked at the note for a second or two.
“You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “that could explain an astonishing number of things.”
“Oh come on,” said Kate. “You’re taking this a bit literally. I just meant I’ve noticed that when you’re not feeling good, or you’re on the spot in some way, you tend to get defensive, and that’s when you ... are you writing all this down as well?”
“Of course. It’s all useful stuff. I might end up mounting a full-scale investigation into myself. Damn all else to do at the moment.”
“No work?”
“No,” said Dirk, gloomily.
Kate tried to give him a shrewd look, but he was staring out of the window.
“And is the fact that you don’t have any work connected in any way to the fact that you were very rude to an attractive woman?”
“Just barging in like that,” muttered Dirk half to himself.
“Don’t tell me,” said Kate, “She wanted you to look for a lost cat.”
“Oh no,” said Dirk. “Not even as grand as that. Gone are the days when I used to have entire cats to look for.”
“What do you mean?”
Dirk described the cat. “See what I have to contend with?” he added.
Kate stared at him.
“You’re not serious!”
“I am,” he said.
“Half a cat?”
“Yes. Just the back half.”
“I thought you said the front half ...?”
“Oh no, she’s got that. That was there alright. She only wanted me to look for the back half.” Dirk stared thoughtfully at London over the raised rim of his china teacup.
Kate looked at him suspicously.
“But isn’t that ... very, very, very weird?”
Dirk turned and faced her.
“I would say,” he declared, “that it was the single most weird and extraordinary phenomenon I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing weird and extraordinary phenomena. Unfortunately,” he added, turning away again “I wasn’t in the mood for it.”
The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time dg-3 Page 20
