“Very well, Mister Plum, just take a seat, and Jim will be with you in a moment.”
Plum, dressed in a midnight-blue three-piece suit and holding a black umbrella with a silver serpent handle, smiles without showing his teeth.
“Nice office – walls of hard-covered books and a fine leather sofa. The secretary’s stupid though… probably his wife,” Plum muses to himself.
“Jim’s just with another visitor… another publisher I believe,” the secretary simpers, as if to say: ‘isn’t that grand!’
“I could slit her throat right here, and then go into his office unannounced for an hour and a half of bullshitting while her corpse empties of blood under the desk,” Plum continues to himself.
“Betty, is my poem back from the illustrator’s… It was supposed to be back today,” Hidshits’s voice blurts out over the intercom on the secretary’s desk.
“Oh my… er, no Jim. It won’t be back until Tuesday. Not until Tuesday, for sure.”
“Oh, all right… but you said today.”
The secretary, still simpering, looks up at Plum, who is still seated on the leather sofa, back erect, knees bent and holding the umbrella upright between his legs. In his mind’s eye, he has already approached the secretary’s desk and asked politely for a paper clip. As the small but buxom woman in her button-up business dress rummages through one of the drawers, Plum slips the icy blade from the head of the umbrella and slashes her throat in a single backhand motion, pausing just long enough before the coup de grace so as to give her eyes the fraction of a second needed to see the attack in action and thus emit that inimitable expression of terror that is identical and yet unique to every murder victim.
Emerging from his violent reverie, Plum becomes aware of the secretary’s occasional glances, nervous, almost pleading in that polite sort of manner that refuses to acknowledge a mortal danger so close at hand. He smiles with his head down, this time showing his teeth.
The heavy door to Hidshits’s office swings open, and out moves a swarthy gentleman in a yellow turban.
“I think you have to think over the legal implications,” says Hidshits, his pear shape hovering in the no-man’s land between his office and the reception area.
But the Turban continues its beeline for the exit, tilted slightly forward so as not to be recognized by whomever it may be that is sitting on that leather sofa.
A moment of silence ensues, with Plum staring coldly at the floor, the secretary grinning up at her boss, and Hidshits rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling, trying to remember if he had indeed agreed with the illustrator to return his poem on Tuesday.
“So you’ve just flown in from England,” asks Hidshits, again seated comfortably in his office, his eyes growing big and stupid through the thick lenses of his reading glasses.
“Ireland, County Cork.”
“I see. What brings you to Kyiv?”
Plum, reclining back into the chestnut Morris armchair, begins to survey the pantheon of framed photos on the wall behind Hidshits’s back.
There’s one with Boss Lard, sweaty-faced and heartily clasping Hidshits’s hands against a background of balloons on a stage; another features Welsh Losser posing proudly in a group shot of several expatriate writers in evening wear, Hidshits partly eclipsed on the end. A third one looks like a newspaper review with the headline, “Night at the Opera ends in near-death shooting.”
“I’m here for a career change. I’m a changeling,” Plum answers dryly, still not looking at his host.
“What line of work are you in?”
“Literature.”
“Do you need a publisher?”
“Yes. I intend to rewrite my life’s story against the background of this ancient capital, which I believe provides an ideal setting for the grotesque.”
“I’m afraid that…”
“No, you aren’t, but you will be.”
Hidshits gulps, as if it only just occurred to him that a pool of saliva had been accumulating in his mouth.
“Have you ever walked over a bridge, Mr. Hidshits?”
“Er, why yes. My wife and I are fond of outings on Trukhaniv Island, which is connected to Kyiv’s Right Bank by a footbridge…”
“I know how to get to Trukhaniv Island, Jim, if you will excuse my familiarity this one time. It probably never occurred to you who might be under that bridge as you trudged across it under sunny skies, ever so carelessly with your better half.”
“Well…”
“No, Mr. Hidshits. It isn’t well – not under bridges, where all manner of vagrants, drug addicts and – believe it or not – mythological creatures dwell.”
Hidshits begins to retreat from the desk that now offers the only divide between him and his uninvited visitor, all the while looking wide-eyed and somewhat curious, like a scientist who’s discovered a new if unpleasant specimen.
“What kind of mythological creatures, you ask, Mr. Hidshits?”
No response.
“I’m no leprechaun, if that’s what you’re thinking. Greedy little bastards. I’d like to club one over the head with a wooden shoe that he’s made until he tells me where he’s hidden his gold.”
Hidshits, feeling the back of his chair up against the wall, realizes that his mouth has been hanging open.
“A banshee? Never touched one, much less bedded her. I like to sleep sound and the screaming would unnerve me to no end.”
“Now just a second…”
“Indeed, Mr. Hidshits, for that’s all we need here to conclude our business. Time is life’s most precious gift and you have much less than you think,” says Plum, rising out of his chair to the stupid astonishment of the Kyiv-based writer turned publisher, whose glasses have slipped halfway down his face.
An hour later, Betty is standing in the office of her boss, taking notes.
“Will that be all, Mr. Plum.”
“For now, Betty.”
“Oh, and Mr. Plum…?”
“Yes, Betty?”
“Would you like me to move that stuffed owl out into the reception area? It looks awfully big in here.”
“I like his company,” replies Plum, smiling eyes over teeth.
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, stringing for Animus Rex Graphic Medias, Unlimited, November 3, 2013