Chapter 2: I Miss la Croc & His Birdo, Me
Vol I. BYZANTINE, Side A. BOARDWALK RHAPSODY
The Longest Game is an Occult Pulp Noir serial. To begin at the begin, or find your way around, see the Table of Contents.
Calumn retched the last bits of bar tapas in front of the Pizza Italy. A shameful worry of whether he’d thrown up far enough away from the crime scene flashed in his mind. Phlegm and bile were mixed with the blood gently rolling down the alley’s incline in shy rivulets. Not a chance. Humours mingled like a medieval doctor’s wettest dream. Calumn watched the fluids, gathering the courage to meet Minerva’s dead gaze.
She was patiently waiting when he looked up, bemused as ever. The rising sun broke the waterline just then, a golden corridor illuminating the damned tableaux. The blood was still crimson, its circle beset with-- What are those? Three chunky cylinders of gray wax and a dead rat. In the distance, Calumn heard a harmonica play.
“Christ. What in the Satanic Panic did you get into? I’m so, so sorry…” Calumn took a few cautious steps toward the circle. Rather than the copper of blood he was expecting, Calumn’s nose was assaulted by a seedy soap smell wafting from the fingery pillars of wax. He was repulsed by them, his hairs rising like a spooked animal.
Time to skip town, something deep in Calumn pleaded. Glimsvale had been a dead end in more ways than the others, and now his reptilian brain coursed with some primal chemical compound screaming synapses of retreat.
An equal yet opposite instinct kept him rooted to the alleway, at the edge of the cursed circle. He patted his pocket, empty save for the crinkle of a ransom note. Calumn could not leave without his Archer. “I really am sorry. But you’re still a thief.”
Calumn held his breath and stepped over the circle of blood, ready for this town to be a footnote.1 His ears throbbed and his eyeballs thrummed a steady beat as he knelt beside Minerva, the smell of offal almost welcome after the violating stench of the gray clumps. He patted her jacket, feeling for the familiar curves of his game piece. Nothing. He avoided disturbing-- looking directly at-- Minerva’s body. Her gaze had been toward the arcade, but Calumn had the sudden thought she might have turned her quizzical glance his direction. He tried to close her eyes like they did in the movies, a pass of his shaking hand over her face. It didn’t work.
The city was quiet down here. What he thought was a harmonica must have been the chorus of seagulls, commuting for a day of starchful scavenge.
Minerva’s red leather purse was Calumn’s last chance at making a clean break with his Archer. He reached across the body where its gold chain lay caught beneath her. Without turning Minerva to her side and spilling her out, he used his sense of touch to open the chunky zipper and rifle through its contents. Calumn’s hand patted the soft interior, until he held the sole item within; a small pistol.
In disbelief, he yanked the gun from the bag and fell back ass-first into the slush of blood and viscera. The gun discharged. Calumn screamed, then covered his mouth and held still, as if that could take back the cacophonous shot. For a moment, Glimsvale remained still as his ears rang.
“Put down the gun!”
“Oh my God!” In the door of the pizzeria, a stocky woman in her fifties pointed a shotgun at his face. She had strong trucker energy, and seemed to know what she was doing with the weapon. She primed her gun, for effect.
“Gun on the ground, mister! You’re under-- under citizen’s arrest!”
Calumn tossed the pistol to the side. He was still squatting over Minerva’s body, which was undeniably a terrible place to be found. “It’s not what it looks like, madam.”
“Don’t you madam me, sicko-- Hey! Somebody, call the police! Police!” She shouted down the empty alleyway for the police for a good minute before stopping.
“Ah.” Calumn tried to sound conciliatory. “This is a big misunderstanding. I found her here-- like this-- while going for a walk.” Technically true.
“I heard the gunshot, bastard. Half the beach heard it, I’m sure-- police! Hey, somebody call them!” The woman took a peek back into the pizzeria, turning back to Calumn. “I was opening this morning,” she shrugged, dropping all hostilities for a moment. “I load my shells in the back. It was actually a coincidence I even brought this thing.” The woman nodded to her shotgun.
“Life is full of happy accidents,” Calumn shrugged back. “If you let me in your store, we can call them--”
“Do you have a cell phone?”
“I do,” Calumn nodded and reached into his coat with a trembling hand.
“No sudden movements!” The pizza trucker shouted. She waved the shotgun. “Citizen’s arrest, bastard! Remember? You work for me. Call the cops.”
Calumn wanted to protest, but instead he dialed 911 for the second time that morning for two reasons. The first was to tell police what had happened before his “citizen’s jailor” could. The second was the shotgun trained on him.
“Hi, hi again, I called before about a stolen object?” he raised a hand, telling Pizza Trucker to wait. In his best customer service voice: “Okay now I’d like to report a dead body. You see, it’s actually kind of a-- yes, I’m in front of the Pizza… Pizza Italy?”
Pizza Trucker pointed at the sign. “The fuck is ‘Pizza Italy?’ Do you see the word ‘Italy’ up there?” Calumn threw his hands up properly like someone at gunpoint for the first time.
Is this Mister Quothe?
“Like the raven,” Georges sang. At seventy-eight his hands were still steady, and he always answered the phone with the same preemptive ditty. For all his talk of corvid harbingers, it was a pigeon watching George’s grandson from across the desk.
Calumn sank in the overstuffed chair like a listless prince, playing I Spy. The study was filled with things nobody bothered to make anymore. Many Cajuns of the old guard were trappers, and Grandpa Georges was a trapper of a different sort. He seemed to collect from a literal gilded age. Calumn once saw his grandfather use a hammer with actual filigree. Fossils, busts, naval equipment, all were neatly cluttered among the soft-lit shelves of green wool-blend felt set in rows of dark lacquered wood.
Georges spoke business on the phone that Calumn later wished he listened to. The objects on the shelves were similar, softly remembered objects that dissolved when he thought directly at them. They must have been treasures worthy of Grandpa Georges-- an storied crab trap, a haint trapped inside a lantern, maybe Lafitte’s lost treasure or at the very least Lafitte’s skull. But the trinkets on those shelves only dissolved under later recall.
Calumn remembered the pigeon, and the phone with the jade handle, finally shut on the desk with a brassy ring. “Me, I shall go get some coffee, mais yeah. I’m sorry to bring you in here and then talk shop, Calumn boy.”
“Mm.” Calumn was distracted for but a moment, and the pigeon was magically gone.
Grandpa Georges got to his feet and stepped around the desk, his barefoot steps soft on the carpet. Even at home, Georges wore his suit, tailored to his narrow frame. But never shoes. The old collector had shock-white hair, as unruly as his grandson’s. The Mark Twain mustache was a generous excess.
Calumn looked for the pigeon, hearing Georges shuffle back into the study. “Ca va, ca vient, ce n'est pas. What do we think, Cal? About the masks they sell me?”
“Sorry, I was looking for Pigeon. Masks?”
Grandpa Georges put two coffee mugs on the desk. “The masks, boy. The masks.” His solemn nod was betrayed by a twinkle in his eye. He meaningfully pointed to a taxidermy squirrel on the desk and then knocked its head off with a whip of the finger. Individually wrapped peanut candies fell out from the hollow. “Me, I know sugar wake me up. Coffee is too old for you yet.”
As Calumn helped himself to a candy, he could feel Georges careful watch. “Petit-enfant, you trip on the shoes when you get stuck in the head, you. Forget the pigeon, Cal. What about the ghost lady there, behind you?”
Waiting for the police was the longest five minutes of Calumn’s life, or at least his day so far. At one point a handful of early-morning tourists with coffees in hand entered the alley until something turned them, be it Minerva’s body, the circle of blood, or the butch lady small-talking with a shotgun pointed at the sky.
Impressively, the police entered both sides of the alleyway at once. A half-dozen officers in black short-sleeved uniforms were taping off the whole street. Two from the Boardwalk had been hailed by Pizza Trucker and approached the scene directly: a tall brute of a man to the left and a short waif of a woman on the right. They reminded him of a painting his grandfather kept in the study.2 The crocodile and the plover were chatting about coroners and forensics until they could take in the scene.
“Citizen’s arrest,” said Pizza Trucker emphatically. “I heard the gunshot and saw this bastard robbing her.”
“Thanks miss, we’ll take it from here,” growled the big one, though not unfriendly. His arms bulged from his sleeves, the uniform fastened over his bulk with thick maroon suspenders that didn’t seem regulation. He had hair and a beard like a Popeye villain, and his eyes danced around the crime scene. “That means you can put the gun down.”
The small one was dressed like a detective, a drab crime-drama suit. She appeared vaguely Hispanic, the way the large one appeared vaguely like a barbarian who sacked Rome. The detective appeared forgettable in the way a spy is forgettable, a weaponized plainness. She took in the scene. Minerva, Calumn. Pizza Trucker being escorted inside. The gun on the ground. Calumn was watching her, until the big officer stepped over the circle: “Whew! That stinks.”
“Careful, Barnum,” warned the detective. Her brows furrowed at the wax fingers on the ground. Calumn committed the name of the large one to memory. Barnum, circus, big circus animal.
Barnum gently lifted up Calumn like he were a child, slapping on handcuffs. Calumn noted his badge said: PORT AUTHORITY. “You fall in this stuff, guy? It’s all over your back.”
“I slipped,” were the first words Calumn could mutter.
The small one tilted her head. “What about the stain on your shirt, did you slip both ways?”
Stain on the shirt? Calumn thought and remembered with a start. “No, that’s--”
“Ortega, let’s save those kind of questions for later, hmm? Look here guy, you got rights see, like the right to say nothing. Because, see, when you say a thing, we can use it later on in court like…” Ortega. Vaguely Hispanic. Like a 2000’s procedural.
“Look, I know my rights, officer. You don’t need to handcuff me okay? That’s wine on my shirt from last night. I didn’t even do anything, she was dead when I got here. The gun was in her purse and it went off.”
“To be fair, these don’t exactly look like exit wound patterns,” offered Barnum with nod to the dead rat laying in the bloody phi.
Ortega tilted her head again. “But you admit you were going through her purse.”
Ah. “I didn’t do anything. Like-- look,” Calumn took a deep breath. “She stole from me, see? She’s the criminal. I was trying to get my stuff back. I have the note to prove it, too-- check my pocket. I didn’t do anything. I called you guys earlier, check your phones.”
Ortega shook her head, looking at the blood, at Minerva’s undone body. “Whatever she stole, it didn’t warrant this. Get him in the car, Barnum.”
The large officer put a hand under Calumn’s cuffed arm, picking him up like a jug and carrying him down the alleyway toward a police vehicle. Calumn struggled against the handcuffs. “No no no, I didn’t kill her! I didn’t kill anybody!”
Barnum kept a gentle grip, so effortless Calumn was almost insulted. The officer spoke quietly, through his teeth. “I told you to keep your mouth shut, son. That’s why.”
“But I didn’t--”
“Besides,” Barnum smiled. Crocodile indeed, or at least Calumn had seen an alligator smile like that on the bayou. “Nothing good ever happens at Borja’s.”
“Borja’s?” Calumn forgot his trouble for just a moment. “The sign just says Italy.”
Barnum shrugged as they approached the squad car. He opened the door, shielding Calumn’s head as he folded the suspect inside. “It’s on the window. Big sticker.”
“Guess I didn’t notice.” Calumn adjusted, the handcuffs wedging his hands between his back and the seat. A seagull landed on the hood of the car, as more onlookers came to gawk at the taped-off alley.
“Barnum!” called Ortega from up above. She held a small notebook, much like Calumn had the night before, solving his own mysteries. She pointed to a small something on the arcade wall across the street from Borja’s. “There’s a camera up here. Get me that footage.”
Barnum gave a mock salute, and slammed the door shut, frightening the seagull away. Calumn was left to his own thoughts. A camera. Guess I didn’t notice that, either.
Petit-enfant, you trip on the shoes when you get stuck in the head, you.
You may continue reading to Chapter 3: Three Beverage Monte, or navigate the Table of Contents.
The Byzantine placed the Archer in the string circle with a staccato clak! The game table stood at the top of the alley overlooking the grisly scene and the ocean beyond. As Calumn below patted down the pockets of Minerva’s varsity jacket, the automaton slumped over, suddenly still. The warlock had been sitting across the table leaning his chair back on two of its legs, playing his harmonica, but did a double-take when he saw where the Byzantine had moved his pawn. “Right into the jaws of the lion, eh? Blunt. Unpoetic. Perhaps you’re losing your touch.” The Archer was now in the circle of string, beside the cat. The warlock pocketed his spit-riddled harmonica, puckered his chin and adjusted his tie, grinning with cracked lips. “The Coin is mine next turn, Byz.” He moved the rat a few spaces, the tied loop of string dragging the cylinders, the cat, and the Archer like a net. The table vanished from sight.
Callambrano, Giussepe. The Fable of Herodotus, 1969, oil on canvas. The painting depicts a crocodile with an Egyptian Plover bird in its open maw, in their alleged symbiotic relationship. The use of “fable” in the title haunted both Calumn and his grandfather, neither of whom could actually verify the symbiosis ever occurring despite being sure they had once seen photographs of this phenomenon. The knowledge that birds do not actually clean crocodile teeth was Calumn’s first experience with the Mandela Effect, and to this day he blames a man named Giuseppe for breaking up such an unlikely friendship with his painting.