Fantastic Metropolis

On his 125th birthday in the last year of the second millennium, the world’s oldest detective, Simon Pickle, raindrenched, walked heavily on sneakers that made sounds like an upset stomach. He was pointed into a powerful wind that carried bomb-shaped drops horizontally. They exploded against his tight face, splattered over his balding head. He breathed water.

One of his hands held a stuffed briefcase of seal-black leather that glistened with wet. The other held the metal skeleton of a an umbrella stripped clean of its nylon canopy. The way Pickle’s rubberized raincoat (an odd-lot bought at a sizable discount) flapped its sleeves down over his finger tips made both the briefcase and umbrella frame seem less like appendages and more like replacement parts for a third-world robot. The long coat’s bottom brushed along glossy pavement, its top buttoned over Pickle’s blue lips. From inside the tent-like garment, he whispered against slimy fabric, “Look at yourself, Simon. Clown as hunter.”

Pickle searched for the numbers on the brownstones he passed. Some had no visible numbers. Some had small, shy digits, practically unreadable. A few had bold numbers shaped in brass or etched in cement. He knew the house he wanted would be among the unmarked anonymous. Elementary.

There it was, what had to be 288 Horatio (between 286 and 290 on the uptown side) a stooped Federal with a black iron gate. The house was set back from the street with enough room for a small garden; a few bushes, a cluster of bent Montauk daisies, a row of drooping hydrangea with color-drained blooms like withered brains.

The garden’s only surviving glory was a battered rose bush still blooming in September. So predictable, that wounded tangle, Simon thought while he stepped over a puddle where a few blush-colored petals lit by the glow from a parlor window floated like drops of blood. “They’re all alike,” he said to the wind, “all arrogant, childlike, inviting capture. They leave trails like Hansel and Gretel in the forest. Even the best of them hang out battle flags, paint targets on their bellies. Then why is the chase so endless? Why am I, a seasoned professional, still such a shmuck? What took me so long?”

Ten stone steps led up to a red wooden door carved with the image of a cyclops. Its bloated face clenched in a smile, looked down at Pickle through the rain curtain. Pickle stared back at the blank floating eye, an empty egg.

He reached under his coat to massage the holster of his ancient Walther P38. It was loaded with Glaser Safety Slug Blue’s, lead in liquid teflon, bullets that fractured on impact and spread shards like cancer. He smiled back at the grotesque guarding the door. “Be nice,” Pickle said. “Be uninvolved. This ain’t your war.”

He braced for a hard climb up the stoop using his elbow for leverage against a wrought iron banister. While his knees throbbed and his arches crackled, without warning, rhyme or reason, Pickle’s mind whirled back to his first major case.

NOVEMBER 3, 1909
TYCOON MURDER SHOCKS GOTHAM
NABOB GOES TO PIECES

Stephan Borpis of New York and Newport, empire builder, railroad magnate, silver baron, coal czar, was found by a parlor maid, his large body neatly sectioned and crammed into a toilet made of Italian marble, the stuff of cathedrals.

Borpis’ obituary read: That this man, for whom order and structure were the spine of life, should die in such a demeaning crumple is more than simple irony. There is a lesson in Borpis’ marvelous life and awful death that reaches beyond admiration, envy or even horror. Must we be reminded, yet again, that Fate has its ways, that dark demons fly through tiny crevices even into the grandest and best defended mansions?

Simon Pickle arrested a Lithuanian labor leader, Spignu Gonik, for that murder. A sweaty, hairy, arrogant creature who had been fired from his job at Borpis Tool & Dye and who was overheard vowing revenge, Gonik bolted when the police came to question him. It took five officers to batten his hatches.

Pickle, triumphant, was promoted for his excellent work in ferreting out Gonik but he had nagging doubts during and after the sensational trial. There were too many loose ends. For one thing, the perpetrator had witnesses who swore that he had been in a Philadelphia bordello at the time of the slaying, carousing and reveling, compliments of the house, on a chit signed by the deceased. In exchange for certain favors, Gonik said, involving contract negotiations. His dismissal, he claimed, was part of a scheme to cover his devious double cross of the workers he represented. Gonik insisted that he was marked for a management job at another Borpis plant in Idaho. The jury laughed at Gonik’s accented denials of guilt. The man’s best witnesses were whores. Pickle remembered how Gonik sizzled while he burned in the electric chair; his fat spattered on the warden’s face. Lights flickered across the tranquil town where the execution took place. Rest in peace.