The following night we presented ourselves at the Baron's
"modest townhouse." Of course, we had to go through the usual routine. First the guards searched us for weapons. We didn't have any, naturally. Why would anybody in their right mind carry around weapons when Greyboar's got his thumbs?
Then the dogs sniffed us. They looked up at Greyboar. He gazed down at them. The great mastiffs whimpered and slunk into the corner.
Then the butler lifted his nose higher than the mountain peaks and announced we'd have to wait "for His Lordship's pleasure." Then we waited for His Lordship's pleasure.
Eventually, it pleased His Lordship to allow us into his august presence. We were ushered into his "study," as he called it. Quite a place, that "study." Maybe six books in the whole room. The rest of it—every wall and most of the floor space—was covered with pelts, mounted heads of more animals than I even knew existed, great stuffed bears and lions and tigers roaring their eternal fury at the bold big game hunter who'd bagged 'em—not without the assistance of maybe five hundred beaters and bearers and guides, I don't imagine.
And there he stood before us, the big game hunter himself, just as I remembered him. Nobility incarnate, from the top of his well-coiffured hair to the tips of his feet. His Lordship, the Baron de Butin. He stood by the mantel, dressed in a smoking jacket made of some kind of material would probably cause me brainstroke if I tried to guess at the price. A great fire roared in the fireplace.
"You may leave us, Jeffrey," he instructed the butler. "I have private business with these gentlemen."
His Lordship was in a man-of-the-people type mood. Right away, the Baron was chatting away like we were three gentlemen discussing the weather over brandy. Eventually, he came around to the point. When he heard what we had to tell him, the man-of-the-people mood went like last year's snow. Most displeased, he was, His Lordship.
After a while, his denunciations and recriminations wound themselves up and he closed his mouth. He bestowed upon us a look of contemptuous dismissal—head back, eyes sighting in down the long aquiline nose like a hunter drawing a bead.
"You may go," he announced.
Greyboar made a motion. I hauled out the leather sack containing the Baron's advance on the job. Broke my heart, this, but Greyboar had insisted and I wasn't going to press the point. Got testy about his professional ethics, Greyboar did.
"We're returning your advance, Your Lordship," explained Greyboar. "Only proper, given that we didn't finish the job."
The Baron's nose lifted higher. "If you think this'll set things straight, you're quite mistaken, my man," he declared. "The issue here is ethics, not money. You are a scoundrel, sirrah, and you may be sure I shall see to it that your despicable behavior in this entire affair is known to the world."
Then Butin's reserve cracked just slightly. "I simply don't understand!" he cried. "A chokester of your reputation!"
Greyboar spread his hands. "Well, Your Lordship, it's like this here. Sure and I was in a dilemma, torn between my professional ethics and my solemn vow never to choke girls. Fortunately, I am—as you may have heard—a student of philosophy. A fortunate man, I've been—I was trained by the King of the Sundjhab, you know?" Greyboar coughed. "A very brief apprenticeship, to be sure—but he was a great guru, the King! Incredible man, to have taught me so much in such a short time. And then! Postgraduate polish applied to me by the great sorcerer Zulkeh. A master dialectician!"
The Baron was staring at Greyboar like he was looking at a madman. I hate to admit it, but I actually had a moment of empathy for His Lordship, for just that one fleeting second.
Greyboar continued. "Of course, once I applied their teachings to my dilemma, the solution came to me almost at once. Hadn't the wizard Zulkeh taught me to seek the higher synthesis which arises from the contradiction of thesis and antithesis? Didn't my guru explain that entropy is the guiding principle of all ethics? So I realized that the dilemma could only be resolved by rising to a higher plane. And what plane could be higher than the increase of entropy, the pursuit of disorder from order?"
The Baron, his face now red as a beet, began to speak. He didn't get far.
"I have not finished," said Greyboar, in that tone of voice he occasionally used. Could silence the surf, that tone of voice.
"So I asked myself, what is really the ethical issue here? What course of action would flow with Time's Arrow, what course resist it with futile immorality? The answer was then obvious! Wonderful girls, Angela and Jenny! Really—natural-born ethical entropists! Not only did the little rascals humiliate a great Lord, but they went further and broke down these old and hoary rigidities concerning the proper sexual order—and with great thermodynamic energy, too! I know, I was there!"
Greyboar was now smiling broadly. "Yes, marvelous lasses! Instinctive philosophes of the second law of thermodynamics! Pioneers of entropy! Explorers of disorder! Of course they had to survive—they were an example for us all!"
Greyboar coughed modestly. "I myself, perhaps. Well! Ignace and I have been close for many years. Perhaps an even greater closeness, perhaps we too could contribute—" He eyed me speculatively. I was furious, you can imagine! Him and his little jokes! I didn't think it was a bit funny!
"Well, perhaps not," admitted Greyboar. "A good lad, Ignace, but he's really quite set in his ways. Not a philosophical bone in his body, I'm afraid. In any event, Your Lordship, I trust I've explained the thing to your satisfaction."
By now the Baron had quite lost his aristocratic reserve. "You are not only a scoundrel, sirrah," he stormed, "you are a pervert and a madman! Leave! At once!"
Again, Greyboar coughed apologetically. "Well, actually, Your Lordship, there remains one small matter which we need to resolve before we go." He held up a hand, forestalling the Baron's next—no doubt peremptory—sentence.
"Won't take but a moment, Your Lordship," said Greyboar soothingly. "I assure you—just a brief moment of your time. You see, oddly enough, I have acquired another client. Two of them, actually. An unusual situation all the way around. Cut my rates to the bone, for one thing."
He turned to me. "What am I being paid again, Ignace?"
I glared at him. As the wise man says: "Fun's fun, but money's money."
"One penny, as you damned well know," I snarled. "They scraped together a shilling and tuppence, but you made me give the rest back. Just needed the one penny, you said, to satisfy the requirements of professional ethics."
"Why, yes, so I did," rumbled the strangler. He turned back to the Baron. And then he grinned.
Even a man as stupid as the Baron finally figured it out at the end. An artist's dream, that momentary tableau. The Great Hunter. Sans Beaters. Sans Bearers. Sans Guides. Sans Tout But the Beast.
He tried to scream for help, but he couldn't get out a sound, even before The Thumbs closed around his throat. I'm not surprised, really. I'm sure it was Greyboar's grin moving toward him. Must have been like staring into his own open grave.
Well, much to my surprise, the whole thing turned out to have quite a few bright spots. "Every storm drowns a few rats," as the wise man says.
First of all, we got out of there without the slightest little ruckus. Always nice, a job that doesn't require a messy getaway. I hear it was five hours before the butler got up enough nerve to peek into the Baron's study, and by then we'd already knocked down eight pots of ale in The Sign of the Trough.
Then—lackeys babble, it's the nature of the breed—the word got all around town, especially among the upper crust where most of our business comes from. Greyboar had set a new world record! The Baron's neck was tied into a double sheepshank. Never been done before. Of course, I made sure the Records Committee got it into the books. But even before they made the official announcement, clients were pounding on our door. Displeasure of the Queen and the Ozarine be damned! Greyboar was back in fashion—big fashion. I even cranked our standard rate up to 1500 quid.
Then, what would you know but two weeks later I got a note from Jenny and Angela inviting me over for dinner. Quite a nice dinner, too, they must have scraped for a week to put it together. I offered to help pay for the food, but they wouldn't hear of it. Wound up staying there quite a while. Well, the whole night, actually. It turned out they weren't really all that rigid in their ways, so to speak, so maybe Greyboar was right about the moral advance of disorder (whatever that meant).
In fact, I found myself spending quite a bit of my time over there, in the days that followed. Well. Actually, to be honest, I found myself spending most of my time over there, when I wasn't attending to business. To my astonishment, whole days would go by—two or three in a row, sometimes—where I didn't even make a token appearance at The Trough. And when I did, more often that not, it was just to conduct a little bit of quick business. Then—off.
Of course, the proper Trough-men made a big deal over it. But I was impervious. Serene in my disregard. The sniggers were flat; the ridicule, limp; the derision, as hollow as an aching tooth.
Eat your hearts out, boys.
Yet, oddly, I didn't boast. I just maintained a dignified silence. No way to explain it, really, that wouldn't have gotten me into the soup with the Trough-men. Sure, and I was having fun. More fun than I'd ever had in my life, in fact. But—
The truth is, it was mainly the peace of mind. I found myself treasuring the moments when Jenny and Angela were asleep even more, in some ways, than the excitement when they were awake. Just listening to them breathe softly in the dark was a treasure I hoarded even more than I'd ever hoarded any coin. And me—a champion miser!
I think— I don't know. Hard to explain. I think it was maybe that being around them made me feel like I might have felt if I hadn't grown up to be me. Or something like that.
Of course, I didn't neglect my managerial responsibilities. Even when it meant grinding my teeth for hours and hours listening to Greyboar droning on about his progress with "Languor" and his hopes for eventual "Torpor" and his daydreams about final "Stupor."
Then—finally! Just when I was sure I'd never hear the end of Greyboar's bragging and boasting about his philosophy—the big loon got distracted. Really distracted.
The Cat had been gone for a week or so. Where? Who knows? Looking for Schrödinger, I expect. But, anyway, one night she showed up again at The Trough. Greyboar invited her over to our table right away, of course. Stubborn, like I said. She sat down, off in her own world. Eventually she got around to asking Greyboar what he'd been up to lately, with about the same interest you might ask a rock how it's feeling. Wouldn't you know it but Greyboar started off and told her the whole story, droning on and on about the philosophical intricacies and the dialectical subtleties and all the other goobledygook he learned from Zulkeh. I mean, not the sort of thing your normal wooer with half a brain would touch with a ten-foot pole, don't you know?
Strange, strange woman. About halfway through the story, the Cat took off her telescope-lens spectacles and gave them a good cleaning. She put them back on and stared at Greyboar until he finished the whole story. Never took her eyes off him once. After all this time, I think it was the first time she actually looked at the guy.
When Greyboar was finally finished, she continued staring at him for a while. Then she said, very abruptly: "Stand up." Greyboar stood. The Cat got up and slowly walked around him—for all the world like a lumberjack sizing up a tree.
She sat back down and stared at him a bit more.
"You know," she said, with an actual tone in her voice, "you're kind of cute. For a gorilla."
Well, I'm a man of the world, so I quickly made a graceful exit. Figured I'd leave the two of them alone for a half hour or so—just long enough to let a little warmth get started, but not so long that Greyboar would ruin it with another philosophy lecture.
But when I went back to the table, they were gone. Didn't see either of them for two weeks. Furious, I was—you wouldn't believe the business I had to turn down!
Finally, Greyboar showed up, smiling like an imbecile, laughing at everything like a tot, practically had to have his chin wiped. Said he'd fallen in love, no less.
It figured. Leave it to a philosophical strangler to fall in love with the weirdest woman in the world. But I was still happier listening to him babble about the Cat than babble about ontology. Leastwise, I could understand some of what he was talking about. Quite a bit, actually.