A Question of Business
“Have you ever heard of the film The Wizard of Australia, Sergeant?”
The crunch of the gravel. The hunched arboreal predawn light.
“Do you mean The Wizard of Oz, sir?”
“I’m not thick, Sergeant. If I had meant The Wizard of Oz, I would have said The Wizard of Oz. I was asking if you’d ever seen The Wizard of Australia.”
“Is it … an adult film, sir?”
“What’s with you this morning?”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that I’ve never heard of —“
A woman approached the two of us. She was wearing an exceptionally low-key version of one of those Dynasty dresses — like it was a distant cousin, maybe, with the slightest hint of ruffled, puffy sleeves; the overall geometric shape a slight tilt, a slight nod to the prevailing sense of ‘Business’ in the air, as if this were the kind of dress that would be suitable for a dress casual business party at the office up in London; and she was already mid-conversation with the Inspector. What was I doing? She was already mid-conversation with the Inspector. How long had it been?
“We’ll do everything we can, Madame,” Inspector Rhinestone said. “Don’t worry. If I miss something —” He turned to face me. “My sergeant is here, too.” He turned back. “Mind like a steel trap, that one.”
The sound of the bells filled the city. A bronze cast summoning of the day. Drunks woke in church graveyards. Church windows summoned color to their figurative cheeks. Candles were lit. The sounds of organs and organ players not only here in the church of St. Gary’s before us, but across this city of dreaming spires as well, where the musicians tested lines of Handel and Bach like they were quality control inspectors examining loop-de-loops of connecting water slides. All this amongst the fading memory of war. There were moments when I thought that the world relied on touch, far more than it knew, and what would happen when it forgot the touch of war? We were forty years out since the last big one. What would happen forty years hence?
Perhaps scenes like these. The local curate — a young man named Cleisthenes — had been found dead in the vestibule of St. Gary’s, and Detective Rhinestone and myself had been called in to investigate. The pair of us had been led into the sacristy, where we saw the man splayed out across the floor with a golden crossed jabbed into his back.
“Who would want to kill a man of religion, sir?”
“Hard to say, Lewisham.” (I should mention before we go any further — that was me, Sergeant Robert Lewisham. I’m aware I didn’t introduce myself last time. I apologize for the oversight.)
We had arrived at the church amongst the dawn and found ourselves moving about more or less in spite of ourselves. We had sent uniform out to go find someone to wake for coffee, but the Priest — one Father Joseph Blanc, a man who seemed to have aged into an accumulating collection of ethereal conceptions as to what it meant to be a tortoise — said he could get something going for us. So it was that the three of us — Detective Rhinestone, Father Blanc, and myself — found ourselves seated around a simple wooden table in a simple room in the rectory overlooking a corner of what looked like Cutteslowe and Sunnymead Park.
“Had Cleisthenes been with you long?” The Inspector asked.
Father Blanc’s voice felt like it was nothing more than the genteel articulation of gravelly bubbles. A cousin to David Attenborough, perhaps. His raised his eyebrows once as he continued to use a spoon to mix milk into his coffee.
“Long?”
“An extended period of time,” I offered.
“Well, these things …” Father Blanc gave a languorous sweep of his hand above the table, as if he were Vanna White revealing what Yahweh had been trying to say all along.
I flexed my hands simultaneously in a subtle show of politeness and leaned in.
“You wouldn’t happen to be waiting for the right moment to tell us something, would you, Father?”
Father Blanc finished a sip and returned his coffee to the table.
“Well,” he said. “One doesn’t wish to cast aspersions, particularly in matters of mortality, for how can anyone adequately do justice to the story of someone’s life; that being said, we at the parish are in the unfortunate position to believe that the curate may or may not have been allowing himself access to the collection plate in order to further his monetary engagement with the traditional game of variance attached to the sport.”
“Ah,” said Detective Rhinestone, conclusively, turning to nod at me in a ‘See? I told you so’ fashion. “Blackmail.”
The priest seemed to come alive in that moment. “What?” He said, his speech now moving quickly. “No, no. Gambling. He was a gambling addict.”
“Oh,” Detective Rhinestone said, nodding. “I see.”