THE TARTAN DETECTIVE
Joanna Howard
for Alexandre
I.
Inside this house, a precipice. The vacation repeats itself: the flight arrives late. Stationed in the inn, light breaks through the pale slatted blinds of the bedroom, carefully tucked into eyelet and down. I emerge from the shadowed corner in blonde wig and dark glasses, knee boots, belted trench coat. Onward the surveillance outing! Paces between houses, retraced. Agraying bent head viewed through the window. This familiar neighborhood sorts into shapes, brick boxes, shingled apse, a pencil addition, eraser cones. Is it evening? I circle the block. The capitulation begins. Next, five carefully demarcated days noted in the moleskine. I transfer the bags to the next location.
(The seams of her stockings are perfectly aligned, her legs charming inside them. She crosses the tiles to a cocktail lounge where her father is seated on a cylindrical stool. In lieu, she has come to ask for her own hand. Her hat in leopard print, sits oddly to one side, as though glued in place. There is something not quite right about her face. The soup has gone cold. Her diamond is blinding—the light comes off in lines inside a haze. The band begins a monotonous refrain. He will see her off at the platform.)
In the yard, an ornamental canon, stationary, snow-covered. Snow falls on the outside pane of the Victorian. Inside, embers litter the hearth. Milo naps just out of reach through the glass. His head falls forward into a paperback novel. Alone for now. I slip off into the night when a man selling bread joins me on the porch. The doorbell rings, and within the house, the scene shifts. I circle the block, and drop a match in the gutter. Night comes with a staggering cold wind. Days continue, passed in the library of the guesthouse, where the books sit perfectly still.
(Under a tartan blanket, the train is just now passing. Already, the itinerary has been set with every hour accounted. The boat awaits. Who could guess so much time could pass with only water in between? How carefully she has been incorporated. The exchange is between men, and the pass off easily executed. It argues that somewhere, from with the elusive mists of his mountains, on his island, a mechanical arm cranks the machine into motion. Still, at the end of every steamer plank awaits a delectable male, though on occasion, beyond and lingering in the distance.)
This town wavers in the light, as though cut from silk. Still, it has an everyday quality: ready-made. Today, I strike out in a different direction. Then, I strike out in another direction, and wander along a street of barbershops. The tavern keeper affects an accent. The small beer garden opens with a gate onto the back alley, and the dumpsters. Empty, with ice on the flagstones. Wrought iron chairs leant against their tables. In the moleskine, I tip in two maps. Lightning flashes in the snow clouds to the west. Point of departure noted. When I’ve located a quarter, I locate the payphone. Milo answers, brightly. I speak in an even voice, with grouped words, and cast around a vague eye. The beer garden fills up with thick pigeons.
I swallow my last page of orders, written in a mysterious hand. We are often unknown to our betters; in this case, our leaders remain hidden, for their own safety, disguised, figures in a haze.
(His furlough begins a silhouette within the fog. In his naval costume, he is entirely removed. An out-cropping of curls, very grand epaulets, he is an unlikely tourist. He takes a turn on the pier, and so they fall in step in a similar direction, without introduction. The mists obscure the water’s edge and the island beyond. The boat is rinsed in salt water, and upturned on the quay. There is no hope of an outing. Following on tradition, the men deliver a few pointed phrases, their demeanor quick and accepting.
In the background, the narrow tower of a castle opens up on one side, a cut away. The curse is prominently displayed. Above the wave’s measured break, the baying shanty of seals rises. They love the warm, balmy weather.)
The west deck of the inn faces the mountains, close to the clouds. Gray in all directions. The guests lounge under lap-robes, invalided. The weather is coldest here just before spring. I zip in my plaid lining.
A decadent sky-rise blocks the view of the Victorian through field glasses. I copy down the transcribed notes: cipher. It begins, The former man sought the pluribus eagle, but went mad.
On given harsh mornings, I awake from a dream where I’ve been waltzing with a torch. The air is clouded with bees, en route to their next location. In the dream, I can never recall if I am the pursued or the pursuer, or if, as I suspect, the role alternates.
For days, I trace the streets. I cable. No instructions. I follow the steps back to the Victorian. Apungent boxwood splits through the gapping boards of the porch. The door stands agape; the staircase curls blackly toward the upstairs offices. I wait in the dark of the parlor, though no footsteps on the landing. From a stained glass dormer high up in the stairwell, a ruddy spot of light crosses the banister and strikes the landing carpet. The office above is ransacked, disarray. Papers blanket the floor and chairs, and float in the corner cobweb. An invitation, carelessly discarded, in Milo’s hand. I borrow the car.
(She’s a guest, but he’s a family friend. Hare for supper. She notes the face in umbrage, which moves into the light of a manor’s corner window in the perpendicular wing. He stretches long to urge an indiscretion. Shadow rests in the gap. The apple of his cheeks, in lines and gashes. Nevertheless, she manages some sleep. The fog continues, unremitting.
In the morning they telephone from below the waterfall to secure any vacancy. The day escapes undocumented, but very much in company. That night, she wilts into a silk pajama set. The sea wind picks up the floral curtains. The lamp light forms a rosette on the ceiling above her face in the camber of smoke. The nightly prayer gathers steam. She begins to count the beams, and as the wind blows off the mist, the island can now be seen.)
The standard skids lightly along the mountain road. The ski lodge, in cedar hues, juts over the lake; the green face of the water extends it beyond the seam of beach. On the opposite shore, I pry open a fishing shanty. I strike a match on a canvas sail. Across the water, a wedding procession moves onto the frozen lawn for photographs. I follow the bride with field glasses. A window in the highest corner of the lodge flashes obliquely. The scullery installed, not in the basement, but in the attic! I recognize his apron in dark stripes. The jig is up! Spotted from a great distance, through the glass. From the dock I signal: bravo, yankee, bravo, yankee, echo. Still, he motions me over the lake. Dark comes on across the water; last light behind the range. I cross on a bar of ice without difficulty.
In the lobby, duffers clutter the fire pit. The elevator is empty, but with the top floor button already depressed. It clambers skyward, and opens onto a long slatted corridor. Overhead, a skylight shines blackly, broken with stars. His condo is all kitchen. Milo waits below the pine garland, fingers warm from skinning charred fruit.
(The war continues in grim distant tones. A radiogram carries instructions from across the water, but the boat will not travel. The night passes again below beams. She slips out before dawn while the girl polishes the stones of the hotel’s foyer. Now out of uniform, done up in plaids and cables, Torquil breakfasts behind glass. From the scrap of her note, he follows from manor to manor, along the coast. The properties have been let, or taken by the RAF, who generously will do it all up again as originally found. Destitute gentry curl deep into their tweeds. In 400 rooms, and 400 portraits, there is only warmth in the linen closet, against the boiler’s copper pipes. )
Safely inside the lodge scullery, I finally throw off my disguise, where below I’m blonde with dark sockets. For weeks, I’ve kept watch through the night. Over head, the beams intersect, and the ceiling is paneled as in the quarters of a ship. The heels of my boots ring against the tiles. A banquet table is laid with a cloth, and a carefully dressed hare.
His gesture is stock, but effective, and from then on I move silently, and keep my breath hushed. A listening mechanism concealed in a potted fern! He darkens the room. Beyond the picture window, the mountain face glows: carelessly near to us. For days the mountains have shown me which way is west, though now, they surround us.
A furtive embrace, and his kiss misses my mouth. Oh, Milo, who to trust? My coat falls open to vibrant effect. The tartan reveals itself. We begin the effortless movement of arms and legs, momentarily full and occupied. There is the smell of perfume, briefly, before I crumple under the cosh.
(Well, well my dears. She arrives in the company of dull pedants, and a grim young family of renters. One breezy tower is kept in-family, and so the legends are still recounted in the late afternoon by the grande dame. In fillebegs, with quick step, he approaches with the tea, along a long corridor lit by dormers. Here, Torquil the displaced laird, the namesake of a golden eagle, narrows on his quarry. A hand of bridge begins across the long table. Who will make a fourth? The littlest girl reads coolly from a book of fairies. The two principals exit, having no knowledge of the game.
Little remains of the furlough week meant to be passed in distant quarters on the small island. For her, tomorrow, the island, at all cost! Tonight, on this dour property, the pipers begin a wedding dance high in the loft of the stables, where this frame gives only the view of moving feet at the crest of the ladder’s rise. Once she takes the first rung, the way back down is blocked in arms. )
Many hours later, I retrieve myself, roughly, from the slats. A now rising dark above my dark socket, and the room partitions to shadows and haze. I search the perimeters. An upturned bedside table scatters the contents of his overnight case: a canister of toothpowder, a camera, a neck kerchief monographed M—a post card with pinked edges shows a line of mounted horsemen—and a page of sonata, but whose? What possible clues can these be? An impenetrable set. In a quick gust the balcony’s French doors give way. Far below, troubadours serenade the honeymooning couple. I put on the flickering lamp, and slip onto the narrow band of the balcony aglow with the clear sheen of the moon on the water. Restoring my wig and now his neck kerchief, I move toward the threshold and set the blinds to half-mast. In the distance, beyond the water, the shadows gather to observe. It is impossible to say which among them takes Milo’s shape, so clumped and hulking are these figures on the coveted shore.
Is there still the pale hope to unknot the bind? Again, I count out the factors, moving across the horizon, now, with bright allure. Forever vulnerable to the seduction of cool fingers, and warning hands which announce, as though inked: Fictitious! This way does not go through to action. My dear Milo tosses me to the lions, or drugged, dragged, goes freely into their mouths. Oh, my Milo.
(If the whirlpool has begun and the boat moves in ever narrowing circles toward the eye, what now, when prayers go unanswered? There are three of them in the boat for the island. Toquil mans the rutter, his pipe bowl turned down against the spray. The engine is flooded, and the pilot passes into a trance. The legend recounts that the rope made from the hair of faithful maidens holds quick in the whorl . But girls fall in love so freely.
As in a dream of the island, it can’t be reached, so with the sea, where she wants to go swimming, a week’s vacation cannot foster so dangerous an adventure. The gale continues, and each knot closer they are another knot off course. Into the swirl the boat tips steeply. The curtain of a wave cuts over the boat’s edge between her person and pale gold Torquil. A coming storm, now smoke from kerosene lit under the caul of his slicker. A skin apart.)
What follows is an appraisal with no object. Only belligerent evergreens. With field glasses, I perform the surveillance. Circling dark forces creep along in the undergrowth. I drop from the balcony along knotted sheets, and then keep a footpath just adjacent to the bar of light running from the terrace’s French doors to the edge of the lake. The wedding celebration runs long inside the lodge, where the waltzing couples divide and rejoin, and divide twice over. Alone or many, wakeful or dreaming? I furrow, and halt at the water’s edge, where on the adjacent shore, a torch flickers. A haze behind my eyes floats fore and aft, and I waft. From within the seam of my lining, I draw the missive. A napkin I’ve pocketed. In the light of the party, these dispatch ravings fall forward in an image of speech, which I harden myself against: Only when dead concern yourself with the accessories of death. All our resources dissipate, and results are few. A fog hangs over our paths from the cloud at the height of your head which smothers without notice. Forward we grind toward change: make use of the piercing clarity, or be left behind.
A sound above in the clouds. The weather offers its enigmatic service. I fall again into a black pool, and work my eyes toward stars, circling, in a thinning patch closed in by clouds. Water steals up, lapping at my hand, and like a turkey, if I open my mouth I will drown in the coming torrents. Mouth, you are needed to decide things. Dear Milo, I am susceptible to grave rhetoric. The revolt will marry us, or there will be mourning.
(In the battle of men against the sea it is not the sea which initiates. The circle of the pool draws the boat evenly from the shore of the island and from the shore of the mainland, and it is as if the boat, caught however briefly in the perimeter of the whorl, might shoot off in any direction, as a rock from a sling, and so decide. It is the engine which catches finally, where rope, however faithful, would have found no grip to anchor. In short of her eyes, Torquil recedes within the curve of water which divides them, and so seeks the calm below the surface, or the quiet eye. Water needs an inhabitant.
Sweet boy, brought up in the sea, and grown old enough to desire and be desired. Caught on his belly on the rim of the boat, his legs tangle, and hold below the caul. So many unrequited loves end in just this way: the body draped half within, half without. His arms reach around the sea, but the sea is not a body to be grasped. )
II.
After some hours I awake on bare cobbled ground with the sun now risen. Gone from the lake, but still on the edge of water, a mill lade, and above me a village of birds quivering on a stone dovecot. I dip Milo’s kerchief in the cool of the lade, and bathe my eyes, but regard all through an aura, watery and undulating. From the deck of the mill, I slip onto the roof, where the sun comes so strongly, I gain an anxious thirst before, again, I pass into sleep, soon again waking. But my hip seems stricken with palsy for a time. The day breaks apart in short lapses viewed through crystal. Soon the apparition of Milo bows over me, and, with evening hands, addresses my fever. A column of spark and ardor extends from my throat, through my mouth. My breath lifts the monogrammed silk. A gap in the parapet shows the panorama: far away, there is the blue line of what looks like the sea. West as I was? Do I walk without my knowledge, or have I been removed? I check my person. The moleskine unscathed! I examine the maps. I turn the book once, and again. At the summit of a small moor, crowning a plateau, a copse gives onto a hollow, a circle of confiding thicket and a flat green within, hidden completely from all but the birds’ eye. An aerodrome! I am again in the thick of the enemy. The day draws long, and the plane is late, the gloaming far advanced, but I mark it. I awake in the lee of a stone. Ahead is the peaty bog, where soon I scuttle in bracken and heather. Beyond the aerodrome’s fixed thicket, the sky inverts. I hang thus above the clouds held to an indolent ground or—deepest within, farthest from outside—to Milo where I dangle the whole weight of my desire. Below, the abyss of sky. Sunstroke. The coming bloom. A great distance from the first lodge, I am on for the next, to reassemble, and regroup.
(This boat does not go to the island. Instead they are returned to the quay, where the sleeping pilot is lifted into a shed. Inside the manor, they part quietly on the stairs. Torquil collapses at the fireside, in slicker and wet socks, his toes in the air. His sleep is brief, and in the night, he awakes to the sound of calm. Out of the house, he sits on the hill, island-side, and sees, for the first time this week, a view unobstructed by fog or spray. The rich dark calm of the waters below. The quay looks roughened, battered, its shape supplanted, and effaced, where the water attempts to soften it. Night is a substance, also. It commingles so totally that a bit of night remains in the waters at dawn on this the last day of his furlough.
The white flash of silk adrift in the distance. What he knows about women is not much. At best, he hopes, a woman is a valve which would open. )
I travel the foothills, and lose myself in this way for a time, seeking the camp of our ally shipbuilders, whose location is starred on my map, though my own location remains unrecognized. I consult the moleskine, which gratefully remains, and take up the fountain pen with eagle’s beak (a lady’s pen) so that, now, the pen point extends the memory! A camera, a postcard, a page of music. The copper pots strung along the mantel in the lodge scullery. The father’s portrait, in naval costume, on the mantelpiece: his absence unexplained. Milo, once our comrade, the suspect, in an era of suspicion. I record the scraps. Impetuous, I write, and I doubt it, in margins, encrypted as in the journal of a child.
Herein, on the dark scrawled pages of the moleskine I retrace the mission which so divides us. Overhead a plane circles, while I cower in the scrub’s shadow. The account in code builds, and so with it offers my past and present, coming now quickly in ink from the mouth of the eagle. And again the recording of the last dispatch: note this age which with its love of gluttony feeds the prosperity of brigands and traitors. Non-persons. Harvesters. Will the same machinery which propels their cause break them in its own implosion? Such naïve altruism is fatal. It is for us to cut off the fuel at its source.
Naps between words. A vision begins, and Milo holds my shoulders on his lap. In locked regard, between us the cord tightens. Milo’s hand dips into my chest, as through the meniscus, and gathers. It is a wakeful dream, far too thrilling to invite sleep. Why not linger in this dream? A dream which listens finally to the cacophony of the sensual? Ominously, the voice of my dispatcher reminds me of the finger that points away from the body, and so attraction and desire pull us from our center. This lie I will never accept. Between action and reverie, two paths stretch out, traversable, but cordoned. The sides of this conflict remain rigid, though between us, myself and Milo, something else. Fraternity? A searing penetration?
A gap in the Dutch door lets out a slice of light, and a morsel of voice. I awake on the porch of the enemy encampment, where in camera, in closed meeting, a conference takes place huis clos. On the door, a wreath of lemons blooms fruit.
(The day begins clear. On the piano’s bench, he sits in uniform, chin in hand. What is seen out the window is little more than the flashing signal from a launch approaching the quay. Her spirits are considerably brightened. There are words on parting, but no comment. The exchange moves across torpid hands, cool from the morning. With no furlough left, he forfeits the island. The mountain has slipped a little, or the swarming dust obscures the path toward town. He walks into the hills away from the edge of the sea. In melancholic reverie, and watching the falconer whose uplifted glove awaits his returning messenger.)
Through the door’s horizon break, only a thin interior slice is visible, wherein strange voices rise from false beards calling each other by the letters of the alphabet. A.’s dark scarf, B’s dark glasses, C’s tipped hat, D’s raised collar. Several sets of hands, with only two voices. They prepare a course of assassination. A weapon concealed in the telephoto lens. The passage by sea plane. All this I learn, at the door of the enemy, to which I have been led or taken in search of Milo.
For some minutes my mind has trouble shaping things. How many days now wandering, and no clear origin? We find our places in the conflict of the cause, displaced as we are in the world, saddened, and crippled. Where artifice has overtaken our lips and eyes, our cheeks, the lines of the brow, now we spend ourselves, we strip ourselves bare, quoth the dispatch.
A man without faults is still water. A man without faults is a man without facets, and is of little interest. I slip along the foundation. There is no sign of him anywhere in the compound. Already the scent of salt in the air reports the closeness of the sea. Tomorrow the shipbuilders, at all cost, to reveal my secret.
(Into the castle, which he has never entered, to photograph the plaque whose grave warnings will make him victim. The staircase exposed to the air threads the layers of the crumbling tower, up toward the parapet, vined with green, down to the cellar, the well, and the crypt, where two ill-fated lovers were lashed together to a rock, ardently embraced in its moss.
The castle’s exposure offers the vista, on one side the mountains, to the other the sea. From behind the black of the camera’s shutter, his eye sits patiently. He considers the manacles, and the water rising on the stone. In the right company, the lashing invites. It was from the top of the ladder that the dance began, the folk song confessed: there is only one girl for the soldier on leave. )
Safe among the shipbuilders, the weeks pass quietly at the edge of the sea, where my name remains hidden, but my reputation renowned. In time the fever lifts, and with it the taste of Milo’s lips, and the pressure of his hands, but not the lingering dark where the hand has once gripped me. Again, I wander carefully on the edge of men, barefoot along the rocks of the shore which cuts sharply apart, as the teeth of cliffs rise up from the water. In these narrow inlets the great skeletons of ships are lashed on stilts and slides.
Instructions follow with some reservations. Reluctantly I forward the moleskine, the last artifact of my tepid allegiance, or rather, my unyielding fidelity to all parties in question, equally, consistently. Note again the rhetoric of the dispatch, for indeed, I too was once a reproachful soubrette. Evaded by Milo, I am returned to watching, where now by night, on the edge of the shore, I await the lights of the sea plane, and the delivery of the chief, who any day, must visit our outpost. The sea plane gives out men, and takes them up again, and I am the boatman between.
In an inn kept in company, the rooms adjoin. In time I find myself in the bed of a ginger-headed shipwright, whose pledging eyes are my equal. With each evening, I know already what he will answer softly, when much later, I am looking in his face. When, in tangled shadows, he reveals what has already been on display. So begins this robust, wanton distraction. An unaccented ardor.
If an explanation is required, it should suffice, that with certain girls, passion moves as a wave over the ledge of a cliff, to return to sea again only in part. In the pool of the rock, the remainder holds still, and reflects.
(The pipers on the road repeat the tune. She approaches with quickstep at the head of the small procession. As he leaves the castle, the curse is revealed, so that together they begin to cross the glebe, where the meadow begins the hills. The launch returns empty across the water rests after the gale. How quiet it seems on the island. A reminder that the destination is rarely the terminus.)
A propeller on the horizon line.
Like the scholar who hides behind the books in his glass carrel, I withdraw myself inwardly from the cause, though as ever, watched and watching. But who has the right to cloister themselves in an arrangement entirely of their own choosing? Await the dispatch. Prepare the boat. Deliver the passengers. In the legend of the river of the dead, we awaken at night to knocking on the door. Strange boats line the shore, without passengers or navigators, but heavily loaded and nearly sinking, their gunwales scarcely above the surface of the water. An hour’s trip may take the entire night. The seaman’s wisdom holds: never board an unknown boat.
I return to something I scarcely recall, daily life around the table.
The inn keeper awakens me with the signed dispatch. The signature in facsimile. I recognize the hand. I shove into the night waters and make for the sea plane. The lantern signals. In cloak and dark glasses, false beard and tipped hat, the chief crouches on the pontoon, soaked to his knees, timorous, clutching, and anticipating passage to the shore. If a car awaits him, we have only this short trip, but the weight of his body lies heavily in the prow. Broad shoulder, whose chill I know all too well, wedged in the point of my skiff! If we have not been introduced, it is for good reason.
Below his disguise I undress him to reveal the wound in his side, to which until now, only the camera has been witness. I have heard it said that in our vocation a man’s life is ancillary to his wanderings, variant excursions and forays, and so if one is afield, the other is adrift. Strike out from a point, trace the streets, retrace the steps, a hope to return to the point of origin. What of a girl’s work? To mime the part, is to be indistinguishable, even hallucinatory. Whatever happens now in Milo’s dreams cannot be reported, and I for one, have never had the courage to hope to report to him. In place of Milo, an unending search for Milo.
In place of Milo, the figure of dispatch.
And now the final piece: in a postcard where the wealth is in the stamp, and for a page of music when a tune tells the story, all the clues are self-obscuring, and the dispatch only reverses the gaze. For now, on the side of his overcoat, blood blooms blackly across the wool. He reclines into my boat, exhausted, resting in stretches and I see him sleeping, as wakefully, I tend the oars.