When he got the news, Greyboar didn't say anything. He just went into his room and spent the next three days staring at that damned portrait. "Practicing my Languor," he said. "Practicing my Languor."
Ah, what the hell. I didn't feel too great myself. Even though all the reports we heard agreed that Gwendolyn had made a clean getaway when it was all over. Not that I was surprised. A completely unreasonable woman. But—
Heh. I'll admit I laughed, thinking about it. Gwendolyn had been a tough cookie even when she was a kid. I could just imagine what she was like now!
After a day or so, I bucked myself up. Life is what it is, and that's all there is to it. What else do you ever get?
Philosophy, my ass. Greyboar could call it entropy till he turned blue in the face, and practice his Languor, and pretend he was discerning the secrets of the eightfold whatchamacallit in the profound depths of the foursome whosit. Me, I stuck with the wise man's most profound saying: "Shit happens."
And, I reminded myself firmly, it was great for the trade! Business was absolutely booming, and nobody had to worry about the porkers anymore. Not stranglers and their customers, at any rate. Oh my, no. The porkers were running their tails off stamping out riot and revolution, ferreting out subversion, grappling the serpent of anarchy, etc., etc. Likewise, the army. Likewise, the Inquisition.
Greyboar, of course, refused to look at it rationally. He called it fin de siècle something or other—angst, I think. Me, I knew it was just that everybody—especially in the upper crust where most of our customers came from—was swept up in the sagacity of the wise man.
Shit was happening, indeed. At which time, as the wise man says: "Better to be the shitter than the shittee."
We were swamped with prospective clients. Greyboar's reputation was now sky-high. Nobody was in his league anymore. Nobody ever was, actually; but now even the cloddies knew it. Greyboar had always been famous in the scholarly journals, mind you. The Journal of Contemporary Assassination, Asphyxiation Quarterly, Garrote Gazette—one or the other always had a reference to him in a current article. And, year after year, like clockwork, Jane's The World's Perps listed him as, and I quote: "the state of the art in the trade" and "the standard by which professional thuggee must be measured."
But now there was a flurry of articles about him in the popular press, too. Most of which—brace yourself—were titled something like "World's Greatest Strangler A Recluse!" and "Greyboar Spurns Another Offer!"
I swear, it broke my heart. More business than you could shake a stick at—more potential business, I should say—and Greyboar turned down 99% of it.
He was—keep a straight face—"bored." He was—don't laugh—"not challenged." He wanted—are you ready for this?—"only jobs which are epistemologically valid, ontologically rigorous, and adhere to ethical entropic axioms."
I'm serious. The guy made a living crushing windpipes—this is not, as a rule, considered intellectually demanding labor—and he insisted on philosophically correct chokes.
Of course, I protested. I denounced. I sermonized on sloth. I whined. I groused.
None of which did the slightest bit of good. Then, seeing starvation looming, I scrounged up what jobs I could which satisfied the great philosophe's dignity.
Weird, weird jobs. For instance: The Royal Astronomical Society hired us to strangle a vampire who was bumping off its members in an observatory. I kid you not. Actually, as it turned out, the whole thing was really on account of the fact that the telescope in the observatory in question was—
Never mind. Some other time. I just bring it up now to illustrate the woeful life of a strangler's agent.
Then, naturally, it got worse, because I made the mistake of complaining to Jenny and Angela about it.
"Pooh," sniffed Jenny. "Sniff," poohed Angela.
The next thing I knew, the two of them were hauling me down to Benvenuti's studio, insisting that I get my own portrait painted alongside their own. "In order to improve my spirits," they said.
I protested at the cost, but that turned out to be a bad move because Benvenuti was making a ton off of his portraits of Jenny and Angela. Which astonished me, since they weren't nudes. Turned out there was a market for great portraits of youthful innocence, if you can believe it. What a weird world. Oh, sure, he gave them several free of charge, which would have been worth a bundle—except Jenny and Angela refused to let me sell them. Which, I'll admit, is not something I pushed very hard. After a while, I got to like having the portraits around.
Then—then!—Benvenuti offered to do a portrait of me. And—brace yourself for some vulgarity here—free of charge. Artists, I decided, had the most disgraceful set of professional ethics I'd ever heard of. A scandal, what it was.
Well, I could hardly refuse under the circumstances. Especially after Jenny and Angela threatened to, ah, "withhold their affections." So there I sat in a studio, day after day, sulking on a stool next to a table loaded with silly fruit. What made it all the worse was that Benny got really into the project.
When he finished, I took one look at the damn thing and flat refused to accept it. What an utterly slanderous portrayal! Jenny and Angela couldn't budge me an inch. Benvenuti just shrugged and put the stupid thing on the market where, to my outrage and disgruntlement, it brought in an astonishing price. Eventually, I heard, it even wound up in some hoity-toity museum.
A Study in Melancholia, indeed!
* * *
Nonsense. What was involved here was my reason, not my emotions. Logic, pure and simple. Greyboar could sneer at my rude, crude, lewd and uncouth intellect. Crap. I knew cause and effect when I saw it.
If Greyboar hadn't taken up philosophy, we never would have gotten involved in l'affaire Prygg. If we hadn't gotten into that mess we never would have gotten into that other idiot business in Blain and Greyboar never would've gotten hooked up with Schrödinger's Cat. If he hadn't gotten the hots for a crazy woman, he never would have dreamed of mixing it up with an artiste. If he hadn't mixed it up with high-falutin' artist types, he wouldn't have gotten soul-sick with the realities of a perfectly reasonable trade. If he had developed what he started calling weltschmerz, we never would have looked twice at doing jobs for out-of-town eccentrics. If he hadn't been out of town doing a weird job for a heretic abbess, his girlfriend wouldn't have run afoul of Church and State. If his lady love hadn't managed to get herself into the silliest scrape you ever heard of—you'll hear about it, hold your horses—he wouldn't have made an even sillier attempt to rescue her. If he hadn't tried to rescue her, we wouldn't have gotten involved in the dwarf business. If we hadn't gotten mixed up with the dwarf business, his sister Gwendolyn wouldn't have developed a soft spot in her heart for the clown. And if Gwendolyn hadn't decided maybe Greyboar wasn't the absolute pure scum of the earth, after all, she certainly wouldn't have—
Never mind. I'm getting ahead of myself. Just take my word, for the moment. Without philosophy, our life would have stayed on an even keel. Instead, like being sucked into a whirlpool, we wound up where we are today.
You'll see.
Chapter 10.
Worse Than the Worst
The job started off bizarre, and then got weirder as it went
along.
First off, we were hired by means of a letter, delivered through the post just like we were the proper haberdasher or respectable jeweler. Not your normal method of employment for a strangler, don't you know?
But there it was, big as life, a letter requesting our professional services. Just a note, really.
Dear Mr. Greyboar:
I find I have need of a professional strangler. Having made inquiries in the proper quarters, I have been assured that you are the very finest practitioner currently active in the trade. Would you be so good as to come to my Abbey? The work will need to be done here.
I shall, of course, reimburse you for all travel expenses, as well as paying your standard fee. I might mention that a very handsome bonus will be provided as
well, upon satisfactory completion of the choke.
Sincerely yours,
Abbess Hildegard
Abbey of the Sisters of Tranquility
"The Abbess Hildegard!" exclaimed Greyboar. "What in the world could she possibly want with me?"
His puzzlement was understandable. Of course, we knew who the Abbess was, at least in a general way. She was famous—notorious, more precisely. The Twelve Popes had excommunicated her years earlier. She'd ignored them, just as she ignored every pronouncement coming from the Temple of the Ecclesiarchs. Rather irritated they got, the Popes, to put it mildly.
First, they talked the Queen of Sfinctria, Belladonna III, into sending the Seventh Cavaliers to raze the Abbey and deliver Hildegard over to the Inquisition. Then, after the Seventh Cavaliers disappeared in Joe's Favorite Woods (that's the forest which surrounds the Abbey), the Queen sent the whole Third Royal Regiment to do the job. After they disappeared, she gave it up. Got in quite a tiff with the Ecclesiarchy about the whole thing.
So, finally, the Ecclesiarchy pulled out all the stops and ordered the gentle monks of the monastery of St. Shriven-on-the-Moor into action. The gentle monks murmured and muttered amongst themselves, working up their usual pogromist fury. But then, to everyone's astonishment, they settled down and told the Popes they couldn't do it. Seems they'd gotten a vision from the Old Geister himself, the gist of which was that falling on the Abbey of the Sisters of Tranquility would be a really stupid move.
The Popes weren't happy about it, but they didn't get where they are by being fools. Not even the Ecclesiarchy in full regalia was about to get into a serious quarrel with the gentle monks of the monastery of St. Shriven-on-the-Moor. Take their visions seriously, the monks do.
The point is, any old lady who'd been able to handle all of that without—so far as anybody could tell—even working up a sweat, well, what would she need a strangler for? What I mean to say is, your average chokester's employer is the type who can't handle their own rough work. We really didn't get much business from people who could make whole armies vanish.
I wasn't keen on taking the job, myself. The Abbey was a fair ways off. Sure, and the Abbess Hildegard said she'd reimburse our travel expenses, but so what? While we were out of town, who knows what lucrative Greyboar-acceptable "ethically correct" choke might come up. Besides, promenading through the countryside sucks. Wafting down a river on a luxury barge is one thing; traipsing through a primeval forest is another story altogether.
Greyboar was of the same opinion, so I figured that was that. Until he mentioned the letter to the Cat over dinner that night.
The Cat had made one of her periodic reappearances early that morning. As soon as they heard, Jenny and Angela came over and invited us all to their house for a big dinner. With all the fancy trimmings. Then charged off with me in tow. They said they needed someone to carry all the provisions they were going to buy.
I was still complaining when we got back to their house. Partly from the labor—a lot of provisions—but mostly from responsible financial concerns. "This cost a lot of money," I whined. (Oh, sure. Did you think I let them pay for it? A man loses his pride, he's got nothing. Especially a little man.)
Jenny was on tiptoe, hauling one of the big pots down from its hook on the kitchen wall. "You've got money, Ignace," she retorted. "Plenty enough to afford a modest little feast."
"Sure do!" added Angela. "And we didn't ask you to pay for it, anyway." She was doing something with dough and a rolling pin over at the counter, flour up to her elbows. " 'A man loses his pride, 'e's got nothing,' " she mimicked, giggling.
Jenny slammed the pot onto the stove. "I'm amazed Greyboar doesn't roll right off his bed, as much loot as you've got stashed under it."
"Business is slow," I whined.
Jenny's hair had grown so long it hung down to her waist. She started doing that incredibly complicated and quick-graceful thing that women with long hair do when they coil it up out of the way that I love to watch when it's Jenny doing it. Smiling like a cherub all the while.
"Bullshit," she retorted. "Business is exclusive. As in: top drawer."
"That's right!" piped Angela. She'd finished whatever she'd been doing with the dough and was washing her arms. Then, snatching up a towel and starting to dry herself, she marched out of the kitchen. A moment or two later she was back, clutching a thick book in her hands.
I recognized it, and couldn't stop myself from wincing.
"The latest edition!" she announced. "Jenny and I bought it not two days ago." She plopped the tome onto the kitchen table and started rifling through the pages.
"I know what it says," I growled. I'd bought a copy of it myself, the day before. A professional has to stay abreast of developments in his field, don't you know? And Jane's The World's Perps is the definitive record.
"Here it is, right at the beginning of the section on stranglers. 'Greyboar. Category: Professional. Class: Super-heavyweight. Rating: AAA.' And there's—"
"I know what it says!"
"—even an addendum. And I quote: 'Our AAA rating may well be obsolete, as by all accounts the chokester often known as "The Thumbs of Eternity" perhaps requires his own AAAA rating. With the possible exception of Ozar's Pythoneus—' "
"That twerp!" I grit my teeth. "That poseur! No way he's—"
Angela blithely drove over me: " '—no other strangler currently in practice can be considered in the same league.' "
She closed the book with a flourish. "So there!"
While she'd been talking, Jenny had left. Now she came back into the kitchen, clutching another book. A very slender volume, with the kind of loose-leaf binding where you can remove the separate pages.
I recognized that one also, of course, and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Or scream.
I settled for growling. "You shouldn't be spending money on that kind of useless stuff."
"We earn enough from our sewing!" snapped Jenny. She plopped the book onto the table next to the other. A mouse next to an elephant.
"This is the one we'd really like to see you guys in," said Angela, softly. "You'd even get mentioned yourself, Ignace, right there in the text, instead of just being a footnote."
I curled my lip. "Yeah, sure I would. For about a month." I marched up to the table and flipped open the new book. Then, pointed to the binding.
"You wanna know why it's loose-leaf?" I demanded. "That's because the thing is obsolete the day it comes out of the printers. Half of everybody in it is already dead. Or crippled or maimed or locked in a lunatic asylum or being exorcised on account of they're possessed by demons."
I gave the book my very finest sneer. "Jane's The World's Heroes, Champions, Knights-Errant, Paladins, Gallants, Chevaliers, Lion-Hearts, Valiants, Exemplars, Beau Ideals, Paragons, Non-Plus-Ultras, Shining Lights, And Other Loose Screws And Goofballs. Ha! Fat chance!"
Angela shook her head fiercely. "It's different! Greyboar could do it!"
"So could you," murmured Jenny. Her finger stroked the open pages. "You'd be real good at it, Ignace. Really you would, if you put your mind to it."
"That's right!" chimed in Angela. "And you guys could survive too!"
"Survive what? Monsters and mayhem and murtherous demons? Maybe." I planted my hands on the table and gave them my superb man-of-the-world stare. "Did you look at the companion volume? The one that takes a wheelbarrow to haul around?"
Silence. But they were still glaring at me. Unreasonable women!
Again, my magnificent sneer. "Oh, sure. Jane's The World's Toast. Last edition I saw was up to four thousand pages. And guess what's listed as the cause of death, more often than not?"
Still glaring. As bad as Gwendolyn!
"Starvation, that's what! Or falling under the talons of a chicken due to weakness from beriberi and dysentery!" I really put the sneer into overdrive. "I can see it already. Me and Greyboar staggering through the Flankn, with signs around our necks. 'Will derring-do for food.' "
 
; Still glaring!
"You could do it," insisted Jenny. Her voice was soft, but firm for all that. "You could!" chipped in Angela. More tempestuous, as usual.
The silent standoff that followed lasted for maybe a minute or so. Then I turned and stalked out of the kitchen. Once in the little living room, I plunked myself down in a chair and glared at the wall, my arms crossed over my chest.
After a while, Jenny and Angela drifted into the room. I ignored them for a bit, until Angela plopped herself in my lap and gave me a big kiss. That was hard to ignore. So were Jenny's hands, rubbing my shoulders.
"S'okay," murmured Angela. "We love you anyway. And you're a hero to us, even if you're a perp to the rest of the world."
"It's not fair," I muttered. "Pay's good. Work's steady."
Jenny kissed the top of my head. "And what else do you ever get in this world?"
"Not fair," I repeated. "I never asked for any damned philosophy."
By now they were pretty much impossible to ignore, and I discovered I wasn't trying anymore. Rather the opposite, actually. Sometime later, Jenny went back to the kitchen to do something or other. After a bit, Angela followed. Before she left, she kissed me and whispered: "You guys could do it. Jenny and I know you could."
Not fair!
* * *
It was a very nice feast. Even if I wasn't in a good mood. Over the brandy afterward—I bought it, without anybody even pestering me—the Cat rose and made a toast.
"Here's to adventure!"