Chapter 4: Rub Jailbird Neko's Nose For Luck
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 choked his questions through the vice-grip of muscle and manicure pressing his voice box into a wall of white cement. Rain pelted from the early morning blues against double-glass barriers to freedom.
“Felicity,” Ortega commanded, as though his assailant were a dog with a chicken bone. “Put him down this instant.”
A pouty huff. “But he’s under arrest!” The woman holding his neck gave Calumn just an inch to struggle, and his glasses clattered to the ground.
He took a deep breath and began protesting his innocence: “I’m a witness!”
“No,” Ortega said. “You’re a suspect, and you’re certainly under arrest.”
While Calumn could not see who held him aloft, he pushed his feet and arms against the wall with all his might. For all the effort, he gained only a precious few inches against the muscle. Above, the Harbormaster’s blurry portrait watched with disapproval, and a handful of uniformed officers were now watching. Sylvester, who had been leaning over the banister, had disappeared. “But that detective guy said I was just a witness--”
“Sylvester? Don’t listen to a word he says,” Ortega squeezed the bridge of her nose. “And Effie, you really better put that man down right now. Effie. One, two…”
Calumn landed on the solid ground without grace. Already this Felicity was storming away in a cacophony of smacked gum and sturdy boots. From his vantage point on the floor, Calumn could squint and see the back of a black baseball cap and a full blonde ponytail. Everything beneath that confused him. Why was I attacked by a pin-up mall cop?
As one of the security officers helped him to his feet, Calumn coughed through his irritated throat and asked Ortega, “So is that your guys’ mascot or something?
“Nope. And I’m not talking about it,” said Ortega as she slapped handcuffs onto Calumn. He craned his neck watching Felicity head up the stairs as he was escorted deeper into a corridor on the first floor.
Ortega swiped a shiny card through a chunky beige box on the wall, opening what Calumn took for a fire escape. Beyond were the prison bars. Jail bars, Calumn tried to comfort himself. His self-soothing humor was answered with a grumbling stomach. At least his raw neck offset some of the pangs in his gut.
Two cells faced one another across a narrow corridor. To Calumn’s left an empty Spartan cell was furnished with a thin bed raised above the floor, a sink, and a mirror. To the right was a bachelor pad. Leaning against the bars of the cluttered cell was Sylvester, who had evidently shut himself into his apartment. “I hear we’re going to be neighbors!” He raised a glass of bourbon, a little maraschino cherry floating, neon red, within.
“Neighbors?” asked Ortega. “You’re going to be roommates.”
“Excuse me?” Sylvester looked hurt. “No, this is solitary. This is good behavior! You can’t lock me in with a murder suspect!”
Ortega blinked, feigning innocence. “Oh, I thought you said he was a witness.”
Calumn shook his head as Ortega unlocked the cell door. It was old, the hinges squawking like a buccaneer’s parrot. The entire affair was an outdated spaghetti western jailhouse, save for the ottomans and shag carpet within.
“Look now, I don’t want this any more than you. Officer-- detective-- Ortega? Could I just take the cell across?”
Sylvester was pacing, quickly tying up the threadbare leisure robe he wore over his shirt and slacks. “This is cruel, Carmen. I’ve made real progress here, you know? Made big breakthroughs. Really contemplating my navel--”
“--Love to hear it--”
“which I can’t do with some creep watching me!”
Ortega shushed him with a manicured nail an inch from the other detective’s face. “Your concerns are noted. Now both of you, get cozy. And keep an eye on him.”
“A babysitter,” Sylvester cried.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said, turning the key and seeing herself out.
Silence ensued. Calumn’s nose adjusted to the scented candle cloy of rose and leather. Sylvester lit a cigarette with a Zippo as if it were a slight-of-hand illusion, staring at his slippers. Calumn gradually eased himself onto a noisy leather ottoman.
Blowing smoke, Sylvester closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Alright kid. The top bunk was for meditation, but you can have it. I’ll just quit meditating, I guess.”
Calumn tried not to notice the flesh-colored poster taped beneath the upper-bunk. Calumn put on his glasses, and details sharpened. Ah. Fresh crack in the lens.
The floor was fractured stone, the walls eggshell-painted cinder blocks festooned with antique wiring. The poster was of a swimsuit model, though the face was sharpied over. Cat ears, whiskers, anime blush lines.
Calumn searched the room, Sylvester’s stack of Esquire magazines in a neat cubby, his grooming equipment collecting dust by the sink. His ankle monitor winked red. Calumn rubbed his neck, still sore from his encounter in the lobby. “Who was that lady before?”
“Who, Ortega? You’ll get more acquainted, don’t you worry.”
Ortega intimidated Calumn, but she hadn’t slammed him around him like a ragdoll. “No, no. The one coming in just as I was, ah, leaving.”
“Oh! Kevlar corset, tactical nylons?” Sylvester raised his eyebrows and took slow drag on the cigarette. “Forget about her, if you’re smart. That’s the harbormaster’s daughter.”
You have the wrong idea, Calumn would have told the mangy detective. Then again, they had locked him away falsely for murder, so they’d had other, bigger, wrong ideas. Thinking of Minerva’s death seemed to fill the room, changing its color a deeper shadow blue.
“Did you do it?” was all the detective asked. He sat on the lower bed, his sharpie-faced muse hovering over one shoulder.
“No. Kill Minerva? No.”
Sylvester hopped to his feet, scratching himself and fidgeting with grace. He bent towards his mirror, grabbing an electric razor to shave his scruff. He spoke loud over the electric drone. “You know, they found her lipstick in your pocket. I thought you types usually went for shoes, underwear.”
“Gross, and no. She swapped it with the Archer. That’s the--”
“The game piece she stole. You keep reminding us. So you’re just obsessive about a chess piece, perfectly normal. What a normal guy.”
It was while being roasted that Calumn noted the Esquire magazines were covered in similar doodles, images of Owen Wilson and Chris Pine festooned with French-chef mustaches and swirly vortex eyes.1 Sylvester reclaimed Calumn’s attention with a loud snotrocket. “Espresso?”
“No. I’m just hungry.”
“Suit yourself,” Sylvester shrugged. Calumn watched him prowl from the sink full of tiny black trimmings to an espresso machine he pulled from storage. The detective’s hands moved with fluid precision as he prepared his roast, the rest of his body slouched and relaxed. Calumn almost had a view of the tattoo again under the rolled-up robe sleeve.
As if sensing eyes on him, Sylvester rolled his sleeves down with a twitch. He turned and gave a lazy smile. “We have your DNA at the scene, you know.”
“Oh, piss off,” Calumn groaned. “That was vomit. Vomit doesn’t count.”
Sylvester laughed to himself, measuring the espresso grounds. A beep followed by the click of the hall door unlocking. Something heavy rolling down the hall toward the cell. Both Calumn and Sylvester craned their necks to see the fuss.
Barnum was pushing a tall metal television stand, the sort Calumn remembered from childhood classrooms. Instead of an old VHS player, there was a laptop on a shelf underneath the clunky black screen. Barnum appeared exhausted, beyond how over it he’d seemed an hour before. The officer looked at Calumn, his expression strange.
Something almost like disappointment, but moreso.
Hate.
The bulky officer unlocked the cell. “Sylvester, step out with me a moment would you?”
“I’m off shift, pal,” he protested.
“Just trust me on this one.” Barnum never took his eyes off Calumn.
Sylvester undid his robe, balled it and tossed it on the cot. Once he stepped out, Barnum turned the key and sighed. He spoke low to Sylvester, but the acoustics of the hall rendered all secrecy forlorn. “Nobody alone with the perp, got it? We’ll transfer him after we talk to the boss, emergency meeting. Even you.”
“What’s with the TV?” whispered Sylvester. “Putting on some Price Is Right for him? I put in a request for some television and Darbie said I was being--”
“Just watch it, and we’ll get our confession,” growled Barnum. He turned to Calumn, who was stating at his shoes pretending he’d turned his ears off. “You’ll want to see this before we have another talk with you. Maybe we can all be more forthright with each other.”
He pressed a button on the computer, and the screen began to play the security footage from the Argh-cade. A grainy gray-tone view from the front of Borja’s during the night. The time on the corner of the screen jumped now and again: A smug french-fry-laden seagull tripping the camera once at 11:20 p.m., a proud seagull-laden cat at 11:32 p.m. The timestamp jumped to 3:35 a.m. The glow reflected off Calumn’s glasses, as he watched, slack-jawed.
The Port Authority’s imposing complex wrapped around a vast courtyard on a cliff proudly overlooking the Atlantic. At its heart was a lighthouse, which had stood longer than the folk of Glimsvale could remember-- and the Glimsvaliant2 have a long memory.
There were two distinct features about the lighthouse that earned its reputation along the city’s waterfront. First, all other structures of its age (and plenty younger) had long since fallen into the sinkholes and soft earth of the city, where their bodies would serve as the bedrock of the next century’s follies. Not the lighthouse. There it stood, unbent, on the cliff.
The second feature was that the lighthouse held no secrets. No hidden floor, no passages into the bowels of the metropolis. One could remark upon its storied past, of course. The gentleman’s agreement in 1804 between a harbormaster and a pirate queen that no cannon would mar its wall, and that it be construed as neutral territory. The treaties signed within, or the love letters sent by pigeon over waves. But a tour guide would be dishonest if they tapped their nose or gave a wink that there was some sinister underbelly or long-lost chamber. And for this one exception, no tour guide embellished. There was a city of embellishments, just beyond.
One change had been made to the lighthouse in the past century: a glass catwalk connecting the lighthouse’s front door to the atrium of the Port Authority’s third story. The sole means of entry into the red-and-white tower was through the cement affair trapping it on three sides. At present, one woman stormed her way through down the long glass hall towards the legendary edifice, shielded from the torrential downpour. Sweat had pooled in the palms of her steel-knuckled tactical half-finger gloves. It was beading down her forehead, funneling cosmetic glitter into her eyes like DIY mace.
Effie Sampson was not prone to nerves, but today was an exception. This tower, after all, was her birthright.
Stepping into the base of the lighthouse, Effie’s surroundings shifted from sleek modernity to the storied New England stonework, warmed by the soft yellow light of wrought iron lamps. The clomp of her boot against the wooden floors announced her presence before dampening over the fur-skin rug of some nameless beast.
“Morning, Miss Sampson,” offered the gangly bespectacled man who sat at a cluttered desk to the base of the winding stair. His glasses hid the slightest double-take as he stuck a sticky-note to the sleeve of his green suit.
“Not a word, Darbie.” warned Effie.
To Darbie’s usual credit, he kept silent and nodded to the stairway before returning to his sticky-notes and typing away at a computer.
Effie began her noisy climb up the narrow wooden stair winding their way toward the office at the top. Each creak broadcast her arrival, and she knew her father would recognize every footfall that traversed these steps. The Harbormaster knew no surprise.
One moment of composure was all Effie could grant herself, gripping the doorknob at the end of her ascent. “Come in, little one,” said the voice on the other side.
Ron Sampson stood where Effie knew he would be. He watched out the high window, surveying the waterfront below; the docks rife with fishing vessels and parasailing endeavors, the Boardwalk just beyond. Her father clasped his hands behind his back, ever lost in his vigil.
“Hoy,” she began, her breath hitched.
Ron looked over his shoulder from the storm. His hair tumbled over a black turtleneck, the salt-and-pepper strands grayed partly from his station, and partly from raising her. “Hoy,” he cautiously returned, before his daughter stepped into the light. “Felicity. Is that what I think it is?”
He pointed not to her dubious uniform, but to the white sash slung over Effie’s shoulder.
“It’s what it says,” Effie tugged on the fabric, its silvery text catching the soft office lighting. “I’m Miss Saltwater Taffy.”
“Yes, I had deduced as much darling,” he sighed. Effie’s father was drawing patience from a deep well, anticipating a drought. “It was my understanding that was a beauty pageant we do for the little ones.”
“Actually, not so.” Effie raised a finger and took a deep breath. “The year is 1998. People got mad they couldn’t enter their babies so they got rid of age requirements and key point there they never specified that it was a minimum age requirement so technically the max age was also lifted I looked back also one time they gave it to an old lady it had something to do with the second World War and her dying wish so there is precedent and I told the coordinator all of this and they said--”
“So they let you compete in a children’s pageant,” the Harbormaster nodded, accepting reality before him without question.
“Right. And the judges let me win, fair and square. Miss Saltwater Taffy gets to be mayor for a day, and I told them I wanted to be a detective in the Port Authority instead. So--”
“No.” Ron raised a hand, crossing the loft to his daughter.
“I want this, Dad.” Effie boxed at the air. “Put me in! You can’t say I’m not qualified, you’ve got Sylvester on the payroll for chrissakes.”
“Effie. We’ve talked about this. Of course I want you by my side, but you need to rise through the ranks. No sea captain’s coattails. I won’t have an exception because you are my daughter.”
“But I am your daughter,” Effie argued.
“You are exceptional, and it’s not by blood nor legacy.” He flashed a rare grin. “You think your old man could have won the Miss Saltwater Taffy crown? Go home, Effie. We can talk about this later.”
“I’m not going home!” Effie slammed a fist on her father’s cluttered desk, harder than she’d intended. She pulled her glove from the time-polished wood, four dents left like toothmarks.
The Harbormaster’s face had hardened, and he opened his mouth to speak. Just then, the alarm sounded. It signaled a fire, or an escaped convict. In this case, it meant both.'
Calumn checked his shave job in the mirror before the reflection filled with smoke, as he finished tying his tie. His last few minutes had escalated somewhat. He tossed Sylvester’s electric razor into the sink, where it landed in a nest of his mustache hair. Calumn rubbed his cheek. I look like a baby. He looked into the eyes of his clean-shaven reflection, and his mind was back on the footage.
The alleyway is empty, a narrow corridor of shops winding from downtown Glimsvale to the boardwalk. The camera faces a sign that says “Pizza,” by a map of Italy. In the window is a large decal reading “Borja’s” that Calumn had failed to see. Calumn’s eyes were on the restaurant sign for just a moment, and he hadn’t noticed the man enter the screen.
A silhouette dragged a long heavy bundle as he walked backwards, down the hill. He knelt and unwrapped the swaddle, moves twitchy like claymation. Minerva’s corpse was fresh within. The kneeling man got to work and Calumn focused on his details. Wide, thin lips stretched across a mottled face, tongue working wildly as he set out lumps of material from his pockets.
“Okay, that’s not me,” Calumn protested. “Look, that guy is twice my age, he looks nothing like me.”
The man’s hairline receded to an oily explosion, hinting at the greasefire of thought within. He sat beside Minerva, panting for breath in a wrinkled gray suit.
Barnum pointed to the pale man. “Still so confident? You step into the light right…now! Smile, you’re on camera.”
“That’s not even remotely me! Look at his suit, look at his face! What are you talking about? What’s he-- oh God,” Calumn fought not to faint as the man on the camera retched a rat from his mouth and broke its neck. Weeping, the murderer pulled a steak knife from his pocket.
Calumn recalled the phi of blood from the crime scene, linking the rat and lumps to Minerva in a great sigil of blood. He knew it was time to look away. Barnum met his gaze, visibly disgusted. Sylvester’s expression was unreadable, but he took another drag on his cigarette. “Where’d you learn the rat trick, kid?”
“That chess piece you were rambling about, wasn’t even at the scene. And don’t try to play the insanity card when we try you.”
“Who says we have to try him?” Sylvester mumbled. “I mean, if he doesn’t sign, who knows he’s here?”
“Aye,” grinned Barnum, crocodile smile. He shut the television off at the worst part.
They had left Calumn to his own thoughts after rolling the television cart from the hall. What he saw hadn’t made sense. These are not the police. Calumn truly realized it in that moment. These are pirates with badges. I am not in the system. Something is wrong. Innocence was no longer presumed, and he could not count on the civility of presumed rights. That was the game, and Calumn was captured.
The microwave behind him was blazing from the arcing energy of a fork, catching flame from vinyl-slip paper. The antiquated security system did the rest of the work-- and Calumn knew his antiques. Any smoke, and the doors opened right up. A very gentle feature for a prison more guarded, and less full of arson tools. Jail, Calumn reminded himself. A jail less full of arson tools.
Calumn stuck his ruined glasses into a pocket, along with a fistfull of case evidence left on the table. Sylvester’s clothes reeked of cologne, but they fit. A clean-shaved detective stepped from the jail cells, squinting to see.
He bumped straight into Barnum’s chest. “Ah--”
“Out of my way,” growled the overgrown officer, rushing for the jail hall.
Calumn navigated his way to the front doors, mingling among the officers and administration complaining about the fire drill in the middle of a downpour.
Effie had followed her father and Darbie down the glass corridor into the chaos of the atrium. In the aftermath of the alarm, it seemed half the Authority decided on an early lunch, braving the rain.
A small cadre now gathered around the Harbormaster, following Ortega’s briefing of events. They collectively ignored the smell of smoke wafting from the heart of the complex.
“We have a ritual murderer on the loose,” Sampson announced to the throng of detectives. “He’s ours. Before this becomes a spree.”
Darbie slouched nearby, tablet in hand. “APB?”
“No,” said Sampson, leaning on the wall beneath his painting. “This was a death on the Boardwalk. We’ve worked hard to break the police of their nasty habit conducting business on our turf. Protect our own. I have every confidence that a handful of us can root this man out before he causes any further trouble. Here’s the plan. Darbie, get our guys a photo of-- what’s his name?”
“Quothe, Calumn,” read Darbie from his tablet. He briefly held up his tablet, showing all those assembled a photograph of Calumn’s face.
Effie balked, recognizing the man with the fuzzy mustache. “That scrawny thing I threw down earlier?”
The Harbormaster silenced her with a glare. “Barnum, I understand you’ve taken a special interest in this Quothe fellow?”
Effie watched Barnum growl, muscles flexed in an anger she’d never seen stirred in the gentle giant. “She was someone’s daughter.”
Samson gave the briefest glance Effie’s way. “I see. Hand-pick your men, you’re the tip of the harpoon, got it? This is all you’re doing. If there’s more to say then I’ll call, but go now.”
Barnum grabbed the shoulders of the two closest officers to him, and made for the parking lot. “Aye. Come on, boys. We’re going fishing.” The security alarm uselessly protested at the shotgun slung over his back.
“Ortega. Oversee water and coast, but I want you canvasing his last whereabouts. Witnesses. History.”
The short detective gave a terse nod. “Sure, boss. First I’ll see to it someone puts out the actual fire in the jail.”
The Harbormaster shrugged. “It’s stone. Sorry about your things, Sylvester.”
Effie hadn’t noticed the detective leaning against the wall beside her. “You think those were my things? That’s taxpayer money well spent on quality of life enrichment for our inmates.”
Sampson sighed. “I have a special job for you with this. Some of the facts seemed applicable to your… skills.”
Sylvester shrugged. “A keen eye, boss. Was it the rats or the blood-smeared runes?”
“In private, Sylvester. My office.”
Effie turned when Sylvester didn’t answer, but he was already gone.
“Officers, you’ll be increasing patrols and putting locals on militia, got it? He’s not buying a bag of chips without us getting wind of it.”
“Aye!” a dozen officers assented, tapping their temples before going to their business. Effie began to walk with them, letting the busy foot traffic camouflage her in a way her uniform could not.
“Effie,” Sampson called patiently. Effie turned to face him, his face more gentle than the stern portrait above. She knew his words before he said them. “Go home. Even Miss Saltwater Taffy has to follow Harbormaster’s orders if she’s detective for a day.”
“Aye,” she touched her fingers to her right temple. She made her way out the door, East Glimsvale awash in blue angry downpour. West, up the hill, she could take the trolly towards Norheid where they kept a modest apartment.
Effie shivered. She had been dressed for fairer weather. Visibility compromised as it was, she watched the outline of Barnum crawling into his squad car, two timid officers fitting into the back seat. Ortega opened an umbrella and head towards the boats. Officers resumed their business, stern and ready to protect Glimsvale.
I am detective for a day, Effie reminded herself. And if she was the detective to apprehend Calumn Quothe, she would prove worthy of being detective tomorrow as well.
Calumn squat behind an alleyway dumpster and screamed at the lightning, his cries muffled by the following thunder. He screamed from exhaustion, from hunger. The adrenaline of his improbable escape, and inevitable pursuit to follow.
Above all, Calumn screamed in wonder.
Magic is real. Magic is real, magic is real. Magic is real.
Minerva, poor Minerva. She had been right after all. Barnum and Sylvester had seen Calumn’s face where Calumn plainly saw another’s. The murderer. Some sickly fuck in a tweed suit, painting her viscera on the cobblestone.
What else was real?
“...the Midwayman showed me, and it’s real. Please.”
“...this game. My associate says that beating it can grant you your heart’s one true desire.”3
“... you play against a clockwork man.”
If Minerva didn’t have the Archer on her, then it was with someone else. Either someone she had trusted-- this associate she’d mentioned, this Midwayman-- or it was in the hands of the killer. Perhaps they were one and the same.
Either way, his grandfather’s legacy had been stolen. Magic was real, and he was under some terrible spell. A backwater office of pirates were on his tail for a murder he did not commit.
“I’m Calumn Quothe, goddamnit,” he told himself blearily, pulling out his sole clue, a business card with his name on it. “Antique game restoration and research specialist.”
He emerged from the alleyway. Behind him was the coast, and ahead the metropolitan river-valley of downtown Glimsvale. In an instant, he was lost amid the throng of umbrellas and salty souls.
You may continue reading to Chapter 5: Is That Fairy Fountain? Or, navigate Table of Contents. Perhaps peruse the latest newsletter, //SHADOW.SAFARI//4.25
Prosopathia (n.): a mild impulse control disorder, characterized by the often unconscious compulsion to alter printed human faces through doodles. The majority of disfigurements are limited to the classics (horns, mustaches, eyepatches), but may include symbols. Derived from the Greek prosopon (mask, face), specifically in the dramatic context.
Prosopathia is not a formally recognized behavioral disorder, and was first termed by Situationists of the late twentieth century, describing the compulsion as an “evolved semi-conscious urge to return the gaze of advertising with absurdity. Mister toothpaste Advert Man smiling at the bus stop does not watch me! It is we that watches he!” (Comtois, Melpomenthalion: the Commodification of Low Stakes Social Resistance, 1987).
A self-titled moniker of the Glimsvalians entrenched in coastal culture. As a rule, these include all the members of the Port Authority. Indeed, every middle-aged man and woman who lives close enough to smell the sea water beat their chest as a Glimsvaliant whether or not they can swim or sail and fancy they just might become a pirate tomorrow.
The Byzantine’s table lapped up waves, just beyond the edge of the beach’s sand. Rain fell upon the board and its denizens, sea wind buffeting the warlock’s hair. The shattered marble rolled on the board toward the Archer, away from the warlock’s rat.
“Pointless. Are you happy, now?” The warlock slumped in his drenched chair, tapping his thumb in a jittery rhythm against the wet wool fabric on his thigh.
The Byzantine had wound to a quiet pause, stuttering with a mechanical hiccup. It slouched, across the table of black, white, and red. The warlock could only balk in wonderment. “A waste of a turn, and a waste of my time. Very well. There is climax, says Mandragoras, and there is anticlimax.*” He loudly moved the rat three spots on the board-- white, black, black.
The soapstone rat’s black string tail knotted a heavy burden behind, but sat proudly beside the golden coin with the faded face. The warlock’s face blossomed into a smile.
“A pleasure, Byz,” He grabbed the gold coin. “Good game, what.”
With that, the warlock hopped from the seat and vanished. He just forgot one thing.**
*
“There is climax, my child, and there is anticlimax. I pray you live between the two, lest the taste of one spoil the promise of the other.” -- Mandragoras, The Four Philosophers.
**
AURIBELLO:
For want of way, this gameful mark I take,
Your wishful coin fair won in playful art;
I now return my token from the board,
With coin and pawn in fist, I safe depart.
-- “The Dreamer of Autua,” (Act 1, Scene 5)