A note to the uninitiated: The Checkout is a slightly different dimension from The Commix, and those shivers should be going up and down your spine right about now…
For we shall see, shan’t we, if The Half Guinea truly IS gone…
Or, in the alternative, if he’s still there…
So I’m sitting in my flat admiring Josh Davies’s head. It’s a fine specimen – a broad forehead that tapers into a narrow jaw, a perfect oval, which isn’t to say that he was a handsome man.
Quite the contrary. The cheekbones are raw, not chiseled, like a mask made from a perennially miserable old man. And the ears – yeah, they’re still intact; kind of jut out, simple-like, but not straight up and down. No, they’re twisted out of shape, like everything else about him.
The nose is straightforward enough. Nothing to see there. The mouth is agape, like that of a captured fish taking its dying breath, which is, I guess, to be expected, as the head was ultimately pulled out of the Dnipro River.
But the really interesting thing about the head, as well as the man, is the eyes. That’s right. They look horrified and horrifying at the same time. They bulge from their sockets as if the last thing they saw before them was a merciless murderer ringing the life out of the neck that held the head into which they were set; an aged and wrinkled neck, like that of a once-proud if curious turkey, always imposing itself into someone else’s business, daring the fates and furies to sunder its ties to this head.
Those eyes – those bugged-out and bloodshot orbs, amazingly well-preserved in their final moments of agony and despair – appear to plead on behalf of the entire head for understanding, if not forgiveness, as if all the sins they had seen committed by the rest of the body were vividly recorded deep inside the head in the moment of its demise and now accessible to any who would dare look deep into its sockets to see.
And it was precisely this that I was doing when my guest that day, the Half Guinea, as he’s known on the pages of this site, began to spin his usual yarn.
Somewhat surprised to have seen the swarthy, middle-aged Mediterranean on my door stoop moments earlier on that otherwise uneventful spring morning in the Ukrainian capital, I promptly invited him in, relieved him of his three-quarter-length black leather jacket, and offered him a seat in an armchair near the imitation fireplace that I nevertheless refer to as my hearth.
“Wanna drink? What bringeth ye to the Left Bank?*** Thank ye for the gift.”
The wrapping paper in which he’d brought the head, which looked like it’d been salvaged from some other gift he’d himself received in a distant Christmas past, lay in tatters on the floor between our feet.
But my guest remained silent, leading me to instantly surmise that an explanation of why he’d stolen the head from my flat in the first place, so many years ago, much less why he’d now decided to return it in person, would not be immediately forthcoming.
So I decided to bide my time, allow the visit to unfold as it might, to hear what this old, even ancient acquaintance of mine might reveal to me in his good time.
It did not take long before the usually garrulous and affable, if sometimes familiar and overbearing, Guinea was behaving like his old self.
He’d accepted my offer of a drink and helped himself to my best Scotch, displayed in small bottles on the nearby mantel. He then pinched his brown rough-hewn forefingers into my tobacco stash, and uninhibitedly availed himself of one of my ivory-bowled pipes, carved into the shape of a lounging Venus, whose hollowed-out stomach holds the burning leaves.
As the match flared up in ignition, the white flame stretched high before his eyes, like some phantom he’d conjured out of the wooden matchstick, a tree demon that had survived the felling of the tree, the splitting of its wood, the mechanical manufacture of this instrument of fire.
“I thought you’d been arrested for the murder of Dirk Dickerson.”
“No, that’s complete nonsense.”
“But…”
“But you read as much in that recent report on Kyiv Unedited, right?”
“Right.”
“Wrong. It’s a complete fabrication, apparently in some transparently desperate attempt to revive readership – if they ever had any.”
“So, Kowalski…”
“Probably. That kid would do anything to make something of himself, to get a name… a girlfriend.”
“So, you were not physically apprehended by a beady-eyed, red-headed detective and his mysterious partner in a green fedora, AND taken to a non-descript flat in Kyiv’s Podil District, WHERE you were held behind glass and then, then apparently beaten and tortured to the point that you started mindlessly reciting seemingly meaningless Latin verse?”
“Oh, please.”
“And you did not dress up like a Catholic priest, make your way willy nilly into the institute for the criminally insane on Frunze Street…”
“Kirilova… Kirilova Street.”
“On Kirilova Street, where you proceeded to torch that pathetic bastard, Dirk Dickerson, himself the murderer of Dr. Woo, as he lay helpless in his bedclothes in a dingy hospital ward and who, seemingly completely out of character, offered no resistance…”
“Hunchy, you’re killing me.”
“And you did not this very morning show up on my doorstep, gift in hand; admittedly a gruesome and macabre gift at that, but one in fact stolen from this very flat so many years ago that I frankly lost hope of every seeing again with the purpose of…”
The Guinea, now red-faced from the Scotch and looking very much like the evil, lascivious bastard anyone who has ever known him knows him to be, barks out a raucous series of hoarse-throated laughs and begins slapping the knees of his green-corduroyed trousers.
The Cornish sits back against the freshly varnished back of his Viennese bentwood chair, his meaty flanks bulging from the folds of his ‘breakfast toga’, eyeing his interlocuter with equal measure of caution and disbelief.
Caution, because the Guinea has set his stare over the Cornish’s head to something behind the Cornish, and disbelief, because he now feels the snub-nosed barrel of Detective John Smith’s cold-blue, steel revolver poking directly into the nape of his neck.
“Someone set me up.”
To be continued…
The Hunched Cornish, April 2, 2025
*** Something’s wrong here. Perhaps terribly so. For the Hunched Cornish maintains a czarist-era apartment in the once-quickly-gentrifying river-hugging district of Podil, on the right bank of lower, northern downtown Kyiv, and not on the city’s left bank. And while we have found no record among the texts in our possession, which specifically indicates that the Cornish’s apartment is in Podil, we strongly contend that
is not anything that is likely to have happened on Kyiv’s left bank, for sky’s sake.
Again, perhaps, the author, whoever that may be, is, with this diametrically opposed change in location, trying to convey and emphasize, in a very ham-fisted and un-writerly manner, some putative quantity of additional effort the Guinea made, crossing the river, and all, to get Davies’s head back to the Cornish. But why go through all that effort to make such a point, if you’re just going to end up relocating the Hunched Cornish to a place, where he cannot possibly be? All told, it is a detail that is so irrelevant, anent, that is, all the trouble the Guinea has gone through to bring Davies’s head back to the Cornish, it need not have been made at all. Whatever the case is, please rest assured, we are writing our home office about this.