MEMP’IS
BOOK
FOUR – “WITCHCRAFT”
(Saturday,
January 5, 2035)
Therefore,
it was not until 1910 hours... late... that Norlin
ducked through the untenanted door of the Prancing Pony and, among yawning
showgirls and cardplaying musicians, observed Henry
Hat and Smyrna Williams at one of the HRI-approved circular pooltables.
The heat being low, both were wearing coats and gloves... his yellow, of
course, a festive red and green Christmas scarf wrapped around the dancer's
throat. The King's "One-Sided Love
Affair" played on the quba. As he crossed over from a zone of shadow,
into light, consequences of Captain Modesty's wrath were evident across Norlin's battered face and torn collar. His qualms regarding personal safety had been
justified, though the measures taken were
inadequate... a hunting party had been lurking in the sub-sub-basement
corridors when he'd emerged from C-Squad...
"You're
hurt..." Smyrna cringed. Under the
raw, unfiltered light, speckles of gray in her brown hair shimmered like
holiday glitter.
"Brilliant! Smart enough for the Trouble Factory
if..." Norlin snapped, "...oh, since the
Family Defense Act, we no longer take female applicants. Pity!"
She
unstoppered a tiny bottle, daubed it on her handkerchief,
then his face...
"Oww... you crazy donna, that's alcohol..."
"Well,
I was only trying to help..." Smyrna replied, indignant.
"Help
finish me off! Stuff's absorbed through the system...what if Skark's waitin' outside? As if I wasn't in enough trouble
already..." and he turned to Henry Hat, his eyes a couple of heaters to
reduce the loaner to a cinder, "...didn't see you at the Captain's public tantrum, by the way..."
Henry
Hat lifted a poolcue, sinking two balls... the purple
and the orange... with one shot.
"Beyond
the probability of fisticuffs, as a consequence of our presumed affiliation,
was there any purpose in my attending?" he asked, "...could anything
I have said, or done, altered the outcome?"
"Well, no... but..."
"Then,
given a choice of risking my health, my mission and, at a minimum, wasting my
time with Captain Modesty's senseless recriminations or putting it to a
productive use, preparing avenues of discovery, encirclement and attack upon
our stylish, linear quarry, could
there have been any other sensible course of action?"
He
banked another shot off the gyred table, striking three points that ghosted an
equilateral (and, had a different policeman been present, flagrantly illegal
triangle), crashing the red ball into the pocket that Smyrna overlooked...
teeth chattering, her own cue raised, torchlike, as
in pictures of Lady Liberty, in EastAmerica's New
York harbor, before the k-ball.
"Well,
no... but you could've shown some loyalty, taken your medicine the way I did..."
"To
take medicine from incompetent physicians," Henry Hat answered,
"...is violence against the self."
He
aimed the poolcue towards a bowl of simfried tofu wedges on a table.
"For you. I've already had plenty..."
"Hasn't eaten one!"
Smyrna contradicted. "I've been
watching..."
"It's how I maintain my lissome figure."
Molly
Tandem emerged from her office, carrying a thin, rectangular object wrapped in
plain, brown paper. The many bracelets
and rings of the Pony's madame jangled and rattled
like nails in a glass jar.
"Officer Hat?"
The man in yellow placed his poolcue
on the table. "That is I..."
"Fellow came by, left this with Oom
Hijk downstairs.
Mentioned you, by name..."
With
Norlin assisting, Henry lay his gift on the green
felt, and removed the paper... it was a flat, white rectangular canvas -
speckled, and with tiny numbers between the dots.
"Our criminal has thought to send me a message... a
puzzle!"
"It
must be a picture..." Smyrna deduced, "a picture of crime, revealed
when one connects the dots! But what are
these numbers?"
"I
suspect they shall prove to correspond to Vizinson's
Universal Colours," the detective said, "a
simple code, much used by compositors in tincture and chromatics. It must be a clue... Mondrian's New Plastic,
or his disciple's New Plasma taking the first step - in thirds or, where
indicated, sevenths..."
"Or,
perhaps, a distraction," Norlin suggested,
through puffed, bloodcrusty lips...
Henry
Hat retrieved a vanishing pencil from his coat, studied the spotted canvas, and
tentative drew his first line between two dots on a vertical plane.
"The
kernel of the mystery, of course, is whether our criminal... this Mondretto... fancies himself an acolyte of Master Mondrian
in his middle or much later period. If
the latter, solution should prove relatively simple, for there may be no diagonality, only points which continue a line or terminate
at right angles may be joined. Van Doesburg, in fact, was expelled from the Neo-Plastic college and rather forcefully, for daring to defend the
diagonal..."
"But,
if it's early Mondrian?" Molly Tandem interposed.
"Then,
we are kebbed!
Certainly, in a precarious position, for the first ventures of the
artist were landscapes and such... unpleasant, achromatic pastorals of weeping
women and dead chrysanthemums."
Henry Hat drew lines connecting three more dots, then set
the painting aside and picked up the Prancing Pony's poolcue
- sinking two more balls with one shot.
"Consider the physics of Intersection: a figure of
two-dimensional aspect... as represented on that canvas, or this table... will
pass through another with no change in direction. Thus, it is possible to draw the figure...
call it X... upon a sheet of paper without resistance. Now, two colliding three-dimensional figures, so attributed, will mutually deflect in
a direction depending on the relative strength and bulk of the projectiles
involved..."
Only four balls remained on the green felt, and, after Hat
sank another, three.
"What of dimensions beyond our own? Conventionally unattainable, but... upon a
canvas contaminated by Protein X, who is to say what may not transpire? Within the Solar Commission and, now, Trouble
Factory, I've found customary police practices insufficient by comparison to a
policy of what may be called Collisions... an arranging of circumstances, like
chrysanthemums, in patterns where undesired aspects come into conflict, and
cancel each other out."
"Well, that would result in plenty of dead
chrysanthemums, not to mention..." and Norlin
glared at Smyrna through swollen, squinty eyes, "weeping women. But how would this relate to a criminal whom
we have never seen - except in dreams, or as hallucinations?"
"I am birthing a strategy which I shall reveal
tomorrow, at breakfast. Suffice it to
say that we must take full advantage of the limited resources of time and place
that are available to us... that is to say, the resources of Jatesology which have survived their promulgator. I shall arrange for a conclave of the highest
minds of Barataria at their source... at Stimwood Academy."
"Where the Emeritus Director Stephen Stimwood, the children's book author, resides in suites
atop the uppermost three stories, attended by caregivers selected from among
the most promising students of Jatesology in all Barataria?" Smyrna nearly swooned. "From all over the
world, in fact? My daughter loved his illustrated trilogy 'The
Measure of Erasure'."
"The very place! And I have already aligned myself with one of
its leading eminences, the renowned Dr. Shore... he has promised to
assemble, for me, a circle of twelve.
The finest Jatesist minds in all Barataria... but that will still not be enough," Henry
Hat said, placing a finger to his nose.
"You, Norlin, must provide four more
talents..."
"Me? No way!" recoiled
the Corporal, waving a skinned and bloody fist... Norlin
had not submitted lightly to the beating the Trouble Factory had been
determined to give him. "I mean I
used to, but... since, well, you know... smart people stay away from me, as if
I were the Turkish flu."
"That
can't be true..." Smyrna flirted.
"Well,
you must use the resources which you possess.
I was speaking, of course, of wild
talents, so your..."
"My... girlfriends?"
Henry
Hat nodded. Smyrna Williams, her
prospects for a journey to Stimwood having flown,
turned her back on both men, crossed her arms over her bosom, pouting... then
reaching under the neckline of her blouse and scratching...
"Shouldn't
you be getting ready to start dancing for the mob?" Norlin
scowled.
"Off-duty,"
the dancer shrugged. "Some sort of kebbin' skin-infection... what sort of girlfriends should Norlin be bringing?"
"Haven't they proven that they can observe, reason,
draw conclusions? That they suffer...
and they remember. Where else will you
find such loyalty?"
"Well... Henry..." Norlin
stammered.
"Stimwood has a certain
reputation," Henry Hat allowed.
"Go to your com, now, and start making calls."
He picked up the poolcue... and,
with a broad smile, scratched.
"Aren't you coming?" Norlin
balked.
The
suncop in the yellow hat shook his head...
deliberating... then placing both hands around Smyrna's waist to guide her next
shot. Norlin,
thinking to talk to her, reached into his jacket, but, finding the bloody
panties still there, stood, flummoxed.
"Keb 'im!"
"Keb who, Officer Norlin?" Smyrna started.
"Eric. Nobody you know, or would want to. Keb 'im, and
the kebbin' rest
of 'em..."
Guided
by the hands of Henry Hat on her hips, Smyrna tapped the cueball. The ricochet carried it off four times, five...
a pentagram within the circle – something dark and forbidden, Norlin thought, vaguely... grazed the black ball and set it
rolling inexorably, if glacially, into the six o’clocke
pocket.
"Must
physical or emotional attachments oppose a life of the mind?" the dancer
appealed.
"Collisions, Miss Williams, Norlin,"
affirmed the suncop, tipping his hat, aiming a
forefinger like the barrel of trancer towards the
Corporal. "Girlfriends await! Off you
go!"