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california
** Part Two **
It's funny how life is sometimes.
Your editor asks for a mystery and you set off figuring there's no
way you'll ever come up with one, but then one finds you. I had been
working on "The Mystery of What I Hope to Accomplish by Riding
a Bus to California" but this seemed better. Everything was
there; a bus full of weird characters, a dead guy, a long road
ahead. Nobody had any reason to kill the little bastard, aside from
the obvious one, but it did seem a little suspicious. Some kind of
slow-acting poison in his lasagna back in Indiana, maybe. If it had
been my fault I think he would have died a little faster. Brain
hemorrhages don't exactly take their time, as far as I know. Plus I
can't think why I'd be writing this if it were just to incriminate
myself. I decided to talk to some more people. Maybe the ones
sitting close by would have some info. Heidi was a washout, but you
know how it is. The people closest to a problem usually have the least
perspective on it.
I decided to talk to the couple in
the seats behind Mr. Personality and his stewardess. They were a
good-looking couple, dressed like Europeans (I braced myself for
another language barrier--why can't these people talk English? It's
the official language of bus travel in the United States,
surprisingly enough). They were the kind of people you could expect
to receive questions with innate good grace, to not offend anyone
out loud, to use salad forks if they were available. In short, the
kind of people who probably heard and digested every word that was
said around them and had a swell time ripping everybody apart later
over a good bottle of wine.
The man was sitting on the aisle,
and he had flashed me that winning European-style diplomacy smile a
few times as I went to my seat (I was just behind and across from
them), so I knew that he knew who I was. I started with him.
"Bonjour," I said
heartily, to break the ice. I pronounced it bahn-jewer. My foreign
language skills aren't real finely honed, but I decided an effort
might look good. It turned out to be just the right language.
"Oh, parlez Francais?" he
asked.
"Um, no, no I don't. Sorry.
English?"
"Of course! How are you?"
He knew damn well I didn't speak his language. Was he trying to
humiliate me?
"Great, fine, thanks. I just
thought I'd see if you knew that, um, gentleman (at this point I
aspirated a baseball into my wind-pipe and had to take a little
break to clear it out. The French couple, of course, accepted the
admittedly revolting display with good grace). Sorry. The guy who
died, did you know him?" (This proved embarrassing to them in a
way my choking had not. Evidently one does not say "die"
in polite company.)
"No, we did not know
him," the man said. He looked at me with a deep regret, no
doubt for my manners. "His passing away was a terrible
tragedy," he added, not being able to resist the correction.
His wife had meanwhile been looking
at me kind of coldly. "Did you know him?" she asked
pointedly.
"No," I answered
semi-truthfully. Then, hoping to draw them out with his connection
to Europe, I added "I heard he was Belgian."
The woman had a violent reaction to
this information. I actually expected from her body language that
she was about to spit, but then I guess she remembered where she was
and realized that it would be on me or her husband if she did.
Finally she just said "I knew he was a weasel. The Belgians are
all imbeciles." She pronounced it am-buh-seals. I was beginning
to like her.
"I didn't have too good an
impression of him myself," I said.
"Yes, we know," said the
man under his breath, leaning toward me and winking.
"You know what?" I asked.
"We were sitting at a table
near the men's room at the Sbarro," he replied. "We heard
something of your-altercation." He smiled conspiratorially.
"We had an artistic
difference," I said. "But I wasn't trying to kill him. He
just irritated me."
"Did someone kill him?"
asked the woman, interested rather than dismayed.
"Not according to the coroner,
but there's been some talk in the bus."
"Oh, everything always has to
be a mystery," said the man jovially, winking at me again.
"Are you a writer of mysteries, my friend?" He must have
noticed more than I thought.
"I'm a writer, but in this
case I'm just curious. I'd rather not be implicated myself, either,
so if something more than a natural death took place, I'd like to
know what it was."
"I'll tell you something,
young man," said an old fop with an English accent, leaning
over the seat. Were there no Americans on this bus? Jesus H. Christ
when are we gonna close those borders?!
"OK, tell me," I said.
"I saw his passport as he was
examining it in the bathroom, and it was clearly an English
passport, not a Belgian one." The French woman looked a little
disappointed.
The bathroom? I thought. "Why
would he be looking at his passport in the bathroom?" I asked.
"He didn't know I was
there," answered the old gentleman evasively. "I was in
the stall and saw him through the crack. The door wasn't hung very
accurately and I had a good view. It was just before you, er,
arrived."
Just my luck to beat a guy up in
the one bathroom in the United States which was under surveillance
by a network of international Greyhound-traveling, eavesdropping
voyeurs.
"Yes, it's true, I was there
also!" said the Scandinavian stewardess, springing up from her
seat and twisting around in one chaotic motion. The French couple
and I looked at her in bewilderment, then at the old guy.
"In the stall?" I asked
hesitantly. Her healthy rosy complexion turned a little rosier, and
without another word she plopped back down in her seat. I looked
back at the fop.
He cleared his throat and tried to
find somewhere to put his eyes. Failing, he changed the subject.
"You see," he said, "a Belgian passport looks like
this." He produced the document in question from his inside
jacket pocket, left. "Whereas an English passport looks like
this." From his inside jacket pocket, right. The French couple
and I stared dumbfounded at the two items.
"Um…" I stammered.
He actually blushed with pleasure
at our reaction and looked coyly away, as though we had heaped
copious praise on his performance of the Beethoven "Appassionata"
piano sonata. "It's a little hobby of mine," he said.
"It would be quite impossible to mistake one for the other at
close range, as you can see."
"Yeah," I said, at a
loss. I looked at the French couple, who were looking at each other,
with what? lust? in their eyes? What was going on here? "Maybe
it's time I went back to my seat," I said. "I'm starting
to feel a little tired."
All three looked sympathetic and
smiled graciously. What had just happened? I wasn't sure I would
ever know.
Part One
** Part Two ** Part Three
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