It is half-past-three in the morning, and the Older Still Well-Built Man is leant back in his brown leather swivel chair at the offices of Kyiv Proper Detective Agency.
He’s chewing on a yellow No. 2 pencil and looking up into a corner of the room near the windows. There’s a spiderweb there that stretches down and onto the top of the window’s bottle-green venetian blinds.
The man is at ease, his large frame bulging over the edges of the chair’s small back, and one might imagine that a smile had taken shape on his clean-shaven face, except that his small mouth makes no discernable movement that would suggest such an expression.
From beyond the paint-chipped door leading into an adjacent room, a sequence of groans and yelps breaks the silence. Around one-half hour later – maybe more – a young man in shirtsleeves and suspenders with his hat cocked back on the crown of his head exits the room and presents himself to the Older Still Well-Built Man.
The young man is sweating and pale, but still manages a self-assured smile as he draws near the Older Man’s desk.
“How much more of this would you recommend, Mac?”
“Are you in a hurry, Sims?”
“No,” says the young man, a bit put back. “It’s just somewhat of an unorthodox practice from my…”
“Well, practice makes perfect, Sims,” interrupts the Man, now looking up with a face completely incongruous to what would otherwise have been taken as a facetious statement.
The Older Man looks tired, tired of this office, tired of his job and, at the moment, tired of having to explain himself to this whelp in a Fedora and suspenders. But he conceals all this by quickly getting to his feet and pushing past the young man, through the paint-chipped door into a small room with a square wooden table over which a pale bare ass is bent, bloodied and bruised, the pants of its owner bunched up at the ankles, his shirttails pulled tightly over his head, which can only be made out by a bump just above the collar of the shirt.
On a couch in the corner lies another man in a gray suit, to all appearances asleep with his hat resting over his face and his wing-tipped shoes propped up on the opposite armrest.
Near the blood-striped buttocks is a third man in saggy jeans cinched tight to his waist, his eyes dull from exhaustion, his black-and-white checkered shirt, unbuttoned at the top, allowing a tuft of gray hair to protrude from his sunken ruddy-colored chest.
The young man begins to come into the room behind Mac, who blocks his entrance with a swift but well-placed back kick that sends the rickety door flying back closed in his face.
“You okay, Step?” asks the Older Man.
Several immeasurable moments later, the Older Man is again sitting back at this desk scribbling into a thick notepad with the yellow No. 2 pencil he’d been chewing on earlier.
“What’s the day, Sims?”
“Why today would be All Hallow Evening, Sir.”
“So, the 31st of October, right?”
“Two hours past, actually.”
“Then it is All Saints Day,” says the Older Man, now looking up with an almost imbecilic smile on his face. I need to go to mass in the morning.”
“I didn’t know you were Catholic.”
“I’m not, Sims. And don’t you go telling anyone that I am. But this city is full of onion-domed Orthodox churches, as you well know. And there are plenty of Pentecostals, Baptists, and even a few Lutheran houses of worship, too. So why not be a Catholic, if just for a day, eh? What do you say to that, Sims?”
The young man tries to smile but instead looks scared.
“What’s wrong with Catholicism? The inquisition certainly wasn’t the worst page in human history, as one must get at the truth, at all costs, as letting lies lie is simply not permissible. If you have a liar, a spreader of not only fibs but really harmful misinformation that leads people astray from not only the truth, but from social order and personal morality, isn’t it better to detain, isolate, and ultimately punish the miscreant before all of society is misled?”
“Sure, Mac,” says the younger man, who’s now turned pale again but is still smiling.
“I’m gonna tell you a story, Sims, one that I’ve never told anyone before.”
The younger man, still standing, retrieves a package of Red Man chewing tobacco from his shirt pocket and shoves a large pinch into his mouth, almost choking as his teeth try to get a grip on the moist brown leaves. His lips tremble and his eyes look teary.
The Older Still Well-Built Man then proceeds to narrate a tale from a time long past, before the Christian era, even predating the Romans and Greeks. A certain Acadian boy, it turns out, was just too curious for his own good. Although his master, a high official in the Babylonian bureaucracy, had warned him continually about his habit of hiding behind the drapes of his working quarters, the boy often couldn’t help but do just that.
The official was otherwise sufficiently pleased with his young apprentice’s work and had even planned to transfer him to the chancellery, where he would be schooled in diplomatic correspondence and given a thorough education in the Egyptian tongue.
But rumors had recently circulated that the boy’s tongue was precisely his problem, and potentially a problem for his Babylonian master.
“Let not the drapes of thy master’s working quarters ensnare you in their folds.
Let not the whispers that issue thereof enjoin you to lend them your ear.
Let not the foolish curiosity of youth excite you to go where angels fear to tread.”
The young man’s face bulges out from the inside from the ball of tobacco he’s been chewing when the Older Man falls silent.
“Is that it?” he finally asks.
“For now, Sims. And don’t you go telling anyone what you’ve learned.”
Filed by the Half Guinea, Nov. 1, 2022