Part 3: L’Affaire, C’Est Fini

As I entered the study of Percival Flordigan, World’s Most Renowned Detective Ever In The History Of The World, I immediately saw that he had not moved an inch since I had left hours ago. Considering the gravity of the case we were working on, I found this shocking and did not hesitate to tell him so.

“My dear friend, far be it from me to question your methods, but there is a murderer afoot, and a most prolific one at that. Yet you haven’t budged since breakfast!”

He looked up from his jigsaw puzzle and said, “Nonsense. I have been to the toilet several times.”

“But what of the murderer?”

“Ah, Wamsbly, don’t you see? This is an extraordinary murderer which calls for an extraordinary plan of action.”

“From what I’ve seen so far, I hardly think ‘action’ is the right word. What is this plan, then?”

“Elementary. Eventually, the murderer will run out of victims and a simple process of elimination will reveal his identity. In fact, I’d wager even you will be able unmask him yourself. How about it? Five bucks says you unmask the murderer?”

“Oh, I plan to unmask the murderer alright. But not by waiting idly while innocent people are slain by a callous monster! This is one case I’ll solve myself!”

I left, slamming the door behind me, aghast at Flordigan’s apathetic behavior. I made my way through the quiet streets of London to the police station. I could count on Inspector Warmshplud’s dim but dogged help at least.

At the station, the Desk Sergeant told me the Inspector had been in his office all morning and graciously pointed the way. I knocked on his door twice, and, receiving no reply, went in. It was horrible. Warmshplud’s chair was in the middle of the room and its height had been adjusted upward until the Inspector had been fed into his own ceiling fan. Thick slices of him were tossed about the room.

Just as the horror of the grisly scene was beginning to sink in, I heard an awful scream. I ran back to front desk. The Sergeant’s body lay next to an idling lawn mower. He had been mowed.

I ran out into the street. The silence was total. I kept running through the city streets, looking for any sign of life. Finally, I spotted a cab and hailed it.

“What a slow day, huh? You’re my first fare,” said the driver as I got in, “Where to?”

“Anywhere there’s people!” I said.

“Oh, I’m not people?” he said, hurt.

“Just drive!”

We drove for hours, but it was no use, block after block, city after city, there was no trace of human activity. At last, in Paris, I got out. When I turned to pay the cab driver, I found his that his head was encased in an aquarium. He had died choking on a goldfish. No wonder I hadn’t heard him scream.

I then made my way to Le Tour Eiffel and ascended. From the top, Paris was a postcard of itself and just as still.

“It’s you, isn’t,” said a voice behind me, causing me to jump so high that I was afraid I’d leave my shoes behind.

A young woman stood at the rail. Her eyes were wild but there was an almost playful gleam in them.

“You’re the murder, aren’t you?” she said, “Am I the last?”

“Madame, I assure you -” I stammered.

“Well, you can’t have me!” she said, and threw herself over. She did not scream as she fell.

As I rode, stunned, back down to Earth, I thought perhaps she had found the only surefire way to thwart the killer. Take your destruction into your own hands and out of the killer’s. What a dismal victory. And, as it turned out, it was not to be.

At the bottom of the tower, on the side from which she had fallen, stood a bloody meat grinder. The killer, having caught her so, had already processed her into stacks of cheeseburgers which were now being feasted upon by a horde of Paris’ notorious feral cats. I turned away wondering how many more horrors I could withstand.

I fled to the airport. Imagine my amazement when I found a plane full of people, just waiting to take off. Laughing crazily, I boarded. I must have seemed mad to my fellow passengers. It wasn’t until we’d left the runway that I thought to ask where we were headed.

“Berlin, my good fellow,” said the man, wary of me.

“Good, good,” I said, “Will there be more of us there?”

He gave me a quizzical look and said, “I’m sure I don’t know.”

I shrugged and leaned back. My adventures had taken their toll. I fell asleep almost immediately and when I awoke we had already landed. Now, if you could imagine my joy at finding that I was no longer alone, imagine its polar opposite at finding myself on a plane full of corpses.

As I struggled to open the emergency exit, the pilot and copilot emerged from the cockpit, completely unaware of what had occurred during the flight.

“My god,” said the pilot, “What is all this?”

I hastily explained the string of perplexing murders and my investigations and assured them that Percival Flordigan, The Legendary Detective Himself, was already on the case in London, omitting that it was merely my most fervent hope that he had, by now, been finally moved to action. I urged them to lock themselves in the cabin. I would investigate Berlin for signs of life.

No soap, the city was empty. I returned dejectedly to the plane and was met by the copilot.

“Have you seen the captain?” he asked, but before I could answer he said, “Oh, there he is.”

I looked out the window where he was pointing in time to see a catapult spring into action, hurling the poor pilot directly at the plane, where he was sucked into the jet engine.

“I say!” I said, “You must take off before it’s too late!”

“You’re the boss,” he said, “Probably. By default or something.”

For days we searched across the globe: Rome, New York, Lima, Tokyo, Tehran, Beijing, Sydney, Johannesburg. Not another living soul was to be found anywhere. Frequently, there were signs of recent activity but it was impossible to tell if we were always just a step behind the killer or staying just a step ahead of him.

In Atlanta I found myself stranded without a pilot. He had been lured away from the plane by a sexy lady who turned out to be a bundle of dynamite wearing a bikini. I began to walk across the country like Superman trying to reconnect with the American people, but with with no people to reconnect with.

Somewhere in Iowa or Idaho (it no longer seemed to matter where I was, only that I was alone) I hopped a passing freight train. I was not surprised when I made my way to the front and found the conductor slumped over the dead man’s switch, keeping the train in motion, perhaps indefinitely, without purpose.

I rode for a while but eventually I jumped off, twisting my ankle in the process. It seemed I would not be going much farther. I sat on the ground for a while, in the mud, just letting my thoughts float and my ankle ache. The train rumbled off into the distance. A little farther down the track was the beginning of a town that never really had a chance to get started before petering out just past the train station. The killer would have to find me here, if he was able to find here. I fashioned a crude crutch from some nearby branches with the intention of walking to the town and finding a bottle of whiskey and a bed to lay down in. If this was going to be the end, I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to make myself comfortable.

I had just struggled to my feet when I heard the voice, “Quite an adventure, eh, my boy?”

“My god!” I said, “Percival, I had given up all hope! Tell me you’ve cracked the case and we can go home to proper, cobbled London!”

It was then that I saw the dagger he held.

“Oh,” I said, ice forming in my stomach, “It was you, wasn’t it. All along.”

“A shame you didn’t accept my wager. You’d have five dollars! I’d have even played shopkeep so you could spend it,” he said with a wink.

That wink was troubling, though, I suppose, no more so than his planet-wide murder spree. I couldn’t feel anything but deflated in defeat, like all the air had gone out of me and out of the world and off into space.

“Why,” I said flatly, without even the conviction of a proper question.

“Why?” he said, “Have I taught you nothing in all these years? My good sir, how can you accuse a killer if you haven’t even established his motive? It’s simply not done.”

“I don’t care what is or isn’t done! Just tell me why! Tell me how you went from the most relentless and fearless opponent of crime that ever lived to the greatest criminal of them all, the assassin of the entire human race!”

For the tiniest sliver of a second, Percival looked shocked by my outburst. 

“Very well,” he said with a sigh, “It’s all these damn cases. They do so cut into my free time. Why, I have a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles that I’ve only been able to fit 773 pieces into! And it’s all so boring, solving these squalid little problems between squalid little people so you can write your squalid little books. And think of it, all those human lives brought to their sudden, violent, messy, sordid end, all tidied up and sold to the gentle folk as entertainment. All those folks who want to spend their Sunday afternoon after church vicariously wallowing in the muck to distract them from the rest of their droning, plodding days.”

“Is that it, then? You didn’t approve of how masses spend their leisure, so you did away with the masses?”

“Oh, no. Of course not. That was just for you. Simply remarking on a perspective you may not have considered about your role in all this. No, my reasons were quite different. I mentioned I was bored, didn’t I? What’s the point of having the world’s greatest crime-solving intellect if no one comes along to challenge it? And who is the only person worthy enough to be my adversary? I am! So I embarked on this little adventure, all the while trying to figure out a way to thwart my fiendish scheme. Unfortunately, I never did, and here we are.”

I summoned the final, fading fumes of resolve and said, “Maybe you could not thwart yourself, but perhaps I still can!”

“Oh, come now. To what end, Wamsbly?” said Percival, without a trace of acrimony, with, in fact, a certain sad, affection, “Even if you could stop me, who would you tell? And who are you, really?  Face it, old chum. You’ve never been anything more than a lens through which others could view my achievements. What will you be with neither audience nor subject?”

His words rang true, all throughout my hollow body. I tried to think of all the billions of lives ended so horribly and yet so casually by my friend and could not summon a even a mote of outrage. There was no feeling at all.

“Let’s put a stop to this, Trevor,” he said, using my given name for the first time in all our acquaintance, “Let’s give the animals back their kingdom and pray they do a better job of it than we did. Come to me, so that we both may have peace.

I let a few last thoughts drift through my mind. They were not prayers, but they were close. Finally, I went to him and embraced darkness, hoping that Cam Newton saw this so he could learn a lesson about losing gracefully.