First he'd phone his usual handyman to have the fellow come round and build a hutch on the balcony, then he'd go shopping for something suitable for breakfast for both him and Pierre. An extra dollar a week should keep the cleaning lady from getting too upset over cleaning the cage. After breakfast he could go down and open the shop.
He had three appointments that afternoon, pert little Mary R., elegant Daphne S. and old, fat, but rich Hannah W. As always he chatted with them easily, dressed them beautifully, and entertained them entirely. However this time he also probed delicately for information. He wasn't sure if the news was public about M. Whitcombe's death, so he couldn't start conversation sighing about that tragedy and he refused to use Millie's death similarly. That left asking his ladies about parties and other functions they'd attended and getting to M. Whitcombe (and hopefully her swami) that way.
That evening, after looking over his new hutch and--satisfied--settling Pierre into it, Henri went to the library. He was most interested in locating any of the books or essays mentioned in the ashen scraps and trying to find out what the referred to 'planks' might be. He also wanted to look at some history of clothing books and see if anything similar in shape and form to the skin hat had been worn in the past.
1 comment:
I.
Ah. As it turned out, rabbits did eat tomatoes and lettuce, but it seemed that such succulent fodder also had an adverse effect on their digestive tracts. The evidence was all over the floor of the newly built hutch. Luckily, Charlie the handyman knew something about rearing rabbits from his childhood in Kentucky and had built the hutch with a wire mesh floor and a removable bottom. It was a clever and homely design, and the mess was easily washed away. The grocer had recommended grains and grasses for Pierre's consumption, and Henri immediately replaced the uneaten portions of tomato and lettuce with a fresh pile of alfalfa. For his part, Pierre sat in a bunch in the corner, like a roosting hen. He stared up at Henri and twitched his bunny nose with as much friendliness as one could expect from such a delicate animal after such a horrendous day.
II.
Mary R. and Daphne S. were, as always, concerned with only the lightest things in life, and had little to offer except roundabout confirmation that Mags Whitcombe's death had yet to hit either the media or the gossip circuit. Neither of them had attended the soiree at the Audubon, but both of them had heard that it had ended spectacularly – Mary in particular was under the impression that the sudden departure of Ramanuja from the stage was a dramatic ploy to end the show. This seemed, from her point of view, to be the consensus in her social circles as well. There was something disturbing in the readiness of high society to trivialize an event that Henri had witnessed, firsthand, as a crisis.
Hannah W. disagreed with the other women's assessments. She had not been to the show either, but had her own sources of information: being a prude at heart, she was a member of the Ladies' Prohibition Club. She had claimed before that her association with the Club was on account of the Prohibition Party's nomination of a woman for the vice-presidency, but Henri suspected that drinking was, in reality, a moral issue for her. To hear it from the grapevine, that issue might have been more rightly addressed between Hannah and her husband. Henri knew well enough to remain neutral on the matter and, of course, to never ever mention Mr. W. But the old woman's tee-totaling clique did include one Jacqueline Whitcombe, Margaret's younger sibling. According to Hannah W., Jacquie (as everyone called her) had spent much of the 23rd discretely calling upon her elder sisters-in-abstinence for aide in locating her missing sister-in-fact. So, through a twist of fate, only the most respectable of Henri's ladies turned out to know anything about this most disgraceful affair, and it was Hannah W.'s opinion that something dreadful, "absolutely dreadful," had happened on the night of the 22nd.
"Well," she began, "For some time, it has been a matter of consternation to the Whitcombes that Margaret is so tied to the Oriental gentleman's apron strings. Apparently her (um) association with this V.K. fellow was the end of a match made in Heaven. You hadn't heard? She was to marry a banker, Richard White, but – and you must know that I don't mean to insinuate a thing about Margaret's fidelity! – as her (um) involvement with V.K. grew, she had less and less time for Richard. Everyone was quite disappointed with her, for obvious reasons." She meant, of course, Richard White's gross wealth.
Henri recognized the man's name, as White had dallied with more than one of his clients in the past. "Oui. He is on the board of the American Bank of Prussia, is he not?"
"That is him. I had heard that the family had taken steps to intervene in the relationship. A private investigator, that's what I heard. My, I hope he was successful in some way! Margaret was always susceptible to outside influences. Her mother used to say that, so it's true. For instance, just day-before-yesterday Jacquie got a phone call from one of Margaret's friends – that Eastern girl that she used to go on about – what was her name? Ecatarina P-something. That one's in with such a bad element, as Jacquie has it. Jacquie said she was a gypsy, but that does sound a bit unlikely. Well, this Ecatarina P. called her and . . ." She had been getting excited, but now she clapped her hands into her broad lap. "Oh, you know, this is the bad sort of gossip. I don't really know Ecatarina at all, and I don't mean to imply that she had anything to do with what may have happened. But that swami fellow must be a derelict, for Jacquie believes now that he had overdosed on opium. Naturally, she is quite worried about Margaret's whereabouts."
III.
At the Mid-Manhattan Library, Henri set about investigating the names of texts and authors from the ashen scraps. Thelonius had them now, and Henri was forced to work from memory.
(Hour 1 – successful library use roll.) Henri was able to learn a little something about a Greek author by the name of Hectaeus of Abdera, who had been mentioned in one of the pieces. Hecataeus was a little know historian, philosopher, and literary critic. Though it seemed that he was generally accepted by historians to be a real person who lived in the late Fourth century BC, during the time of Alexander and his satraps, none of Hectaeus' works had managed to survive to the present day. Large portions of them could be found in the works of Diodorus Siculus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Pliny the Elder – only one of the names rang a bell for Henri, namely Pliny, and not that he had ever read anything by the man. Hectaeus' lost dissertation, On the Hyperboreans, was held to be the definitive text on Hyperborean religion and statecraft.
(Clarifications for terms in Grivale's text:
- Scythians: ?
- Delos: ?
- Dodona: ?
- Carystos: ?
(Henri can spend an hour in the library for a library use check to research any of the above terms.)
- Euboea: (Failed history roll, failed archaeology roll. Successful knowledge roll.) The second largest Greek island.)
The Hyperboreans, unlike their ethnographer, were more widely written about; but, like Hectaeus, much that was known about them was considered apocryphal. In Pablo Grivale's The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Henri found a nice summary piece. (See Manhattan blog.) Leaving the dictionary behind, he determined that the Hyperboreans had been identified with many different peoples – Gerloch himself had given a list of many of these nations in his scraps, but Henri could not recall them. Works in the library generally considered them to be an unidentified nation who had lived in the remote north reaches of Europe and were in days of Alexander the Great, already a very ancient civilization.
(Hour 2, 3, 4 – two failed library use checks and a successful one.) Though there seemed to be nothing about anybody named Leonis or any planks with Slavic runes on them, the Mid-Manhattan did have copies of a cheaply printed German magazine, Ostara. Therein, Henri found an article written by Niklas Abendroth. Why, this was the very article mentioned in Gerloch's scraps! Unfortunately, it was entirely in German. Unable to check the periodical out, Henri instead did his best to copy down, in his best mimicry of Germanic-Roman script, what appeared to be one of the translations from Gerloch's notes. By dumb luck, a passing librarian noticed what he was doing and, knowing a little German herself, offered to translate the brief passage for him:
for Olaf
I know that I hang on a windy tree
for days and nights
wounded on his axe the hammer of Thor
only he myself
~
I know Thor when I see
up in a tree
~
Quite tired from the tedium of having to dig through so many magazines for so long with so little profit, Henri resolved that he should spend his last hour at the library researching a topic with which he was more familiar: clothing. (Hour 5 - combined library use and dressmaking roll, one time offer – passed.) Referencing slightly more esoteric works than his usual fare, Henri determined that designs like the one he had seen had been used in Manichaean and Buddhist rites in Persia since the Fourteenth Century. A monograph by one Caspur Alexandru suggested that the use of similar headpieces might date back even further, as a hide crown that seemed very similar in construction to the four-piece cross design in Gerloch's home was mentioned in a historical work by the Ninth Century Arabic historian Ibn Ishmael. Though Alexandru's own expertise seem to lie in Near Eastern history, he added, "I can not help but to remark on a similar design depicted on an amulet tablet from Harappan civilization. The figure depicted wearing this crown is thought to be a priest of the Vedic god Rudra." (Knowledge roll passed.) Henri didn't know about any Rudras, but he had read in The Times, with some fascination, about the exploits of John Marshall and R. Banerji, the discoverers of the the ancient civilization – the controversial site was thought to have been as ancient as Mesopotamia itself. Why, if such a connection was to be made, then the design of the hat would reach back to the very dawn of civilization – over four thousand years! Alternatively, as Henri could well reason for himself, the elements of the hat's design were simply so basic that their replication across such vast spans of time could easily be a matter of coincidence.
Not entirely unhappily, there was no reference to human hide being used in the design of the attested-for seventh century versions.
It had grown late. Henri's patience for the library and its rows of quiet, musty pages had waned. He found the idea of going home and checking on the well-being of his new pet a good deal more interesting than remaining any longer amongst the books.
Night had fallen and it had begun to rain. When he pushed the double front doors open, the special muffling quality of a building filled with paper gave way to the rhythmic, but likewise dampening, patter of drizzle on concrete.
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