The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (20 page)

“I DON’T DO CATS,” said Dirk Gently.

His tone was sharp. He felt he had come up in the world. He had no evidence to support this view, he just felt it was about time. He also had indigestion, but that had nothing whatever to do with it.

“Your advertisement says ...”

“The advertisement is out of date,” snapped Dirk. “I don’t do cats.” He waved her away and pretended to be busy with some paperwork. “Then what do you do?” she persisted.

Dirk looked up curtly. He had taken against this woman as soon as she walked in. Not only had she caught him completely off guard, but she was also irritatingly beautiful. He didn’t like beautiful women.

They upset him, with their grace, their charm, their utter loveliness, and their complete refusal to out to dinner with him. He could tell, the very instant this Melinda woman walked into the room, that she wouldn’t out to dinner with him if he was the last man on earth and had a pink Cadillac convertible, so he decided to take preemtive action. If she was not going to not go out to dinner with him, then she would not go out to dinner with him on his terms.

“None of your business,” he snapped. His gut gurgled painfully.

She raised her other eyebrow as well.

“Has the appointment I made with you caught you at a bad time?” “Yes,” thought Dirk, though he didn’t say it. It was one of the worst months he could remember. Business had been slow, but not merely slow.

What was normally a trickle had first slowed to a dribble and then dried up completely. Nothing.

Nobody. No work whatever, unless you included the batty old woman who had come in with a dog whose name she couldn’t remember. She had suffered, she said, a minor blow to the head and had forgotten her dog’s name, as a result of which he would not come when she called. Please could he find out what his name was? Normally she would ask her husband, she explained, only he had recently died bungee jumping which he shouldn’t have been doing at his age only it was his seventieth birthday and he said he’d do exactly what he wanted even if it killed him which of course it did, and though she had of course tried contacting him through a medium the only message she’d got from him was that he didn’t believe in all this stupid spiritualist nonsense, it was all a damned fraud, which she thought was very rude of him, and certainly rather embarrassing for the medium. And so on.

He had taken the job. This was what it had come to.

He didn’t say any of this, of course. He just gave the Melinda woman a cold look and said, “This is a respectable private investigation business. I ...” “Respectable,” she said, “or respected?”

“What do you mean?” Dirk usually produced much sharper retorts than this, but, as the woman said, she had caught him at a bad time. After a weekend dominated by the struggle to identify a dog, nothing at all had happened yesterday, except for one thing that had given him a very nasty turn and made him wonder if he was going mad.

“Big difference,” the Melinda woman continued. “Like the difference between something that’s supposedly inflatable and something that’s actually inflated. Between something that’s supposedly unbreakable and something that will actually survive a good fling at the wall.”

“What?” said Dirk.

“I mean that however respectable your business may be, it was actually respected you’d probably be able to afford a carpet, some paint on the walls, and maybe even another chair in here for a person to sit on.”

“You don’t need a chair,” he said. “I’m afraid you are he under a misapprehension. We have nothing to discuss. Good day to you, dear lady, I am not going to look for your lost cat

“I didn’t say it was a lost cat.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dirk. “You distinctly ...”

“I said it was a sort of lost cat. It’s half lost.”

Dirk looked at her expressionlessly. Apart from being extremely good-looking in a blondish, willowyish kind of way, she was dressed well in an “I don’t care what I wear, just any old thing that’s lying around”

kind of way that relies on extremely careful about what you leave lying around. She was obviously pretty bright, probably had a pretty good job, like running some sort of major textile or telecommunications company despite being clearly only thirty-two. In other words, she was exactly the sort of person who didn’t mislay cats, and certainly didn’t go running off to poky little private detective agencies if she did.

He felt ill at ease.

“Talk sense, please,” he said sharply. “My time is valuable.”

“Oh yes? How valuable?”

She looked scornfully around his office. He had to admit to himself that it was grim, but he was damned if he was just going to sit there and take it. Just because he needed the work, needed the money, had nothing better to do with his time, there was no reason for anybody to think that he was at the beck and call of every good-looking woman who walked into his office offering to pay for his services. He felt humiliated.

“I’m not talking about my scale of fees, though it is, I promise you, awesome. I was merely thinking of time passing. Time that won’t pass this way again.” He leaned forward in a pointed manner.

“Time is a finite entity, you know. Only about four billion years to go till the sun explodes. I know it seems like a lot now, but it will soon go if we just squander it on frivolous nonsense and small talk.”

“Small talk! This is half of my cat we’re talking about!”

“Madam, I don’t know who this ‘we’ is that you are referring to, but ...” “Listen. You may choose, when you’ve heard the details of this case, not to accept it because it is, I admit, a little odd. But I made an appointment to see you on the basis of what it said in your advertisement, to whit, that you find lost cats, and if you turn me down solely on the basis that you do not find lost cats, then I must remind you that there is such a thing as the Trades Descriptions Act. I can’t remember exactly what it says, but I bet you five pounds it says you can’t do that.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll take down the details of the case.”

“Thank you.”

“And then I’ll turn it down.”

“That’s your business.”

“The point I’m trying to make,” said Dirk, “is that it isn’t. So. What is this cat’s name?”

“Gusty.”

“Gusty.”

“Yes. Short for Gusty Winds.”

Dirk looked at her. “I won’t ask,” he said.

“You’ll wish you had.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

She shrugged.

“Male?” said Dirk. “Female?”

“Male.”

“Age?”

“Four years.”

“Description?”

“Well, um. That’s a bit tricky.”

“How hard can a question be? What is he, black? White? Ginger? Tabby?”

“Oh. Siamese.”

“Good,” said Dirk, writing down “Siamese.” “And when did you last see him?”

“About three minutes ago.”

Dirk laid his pencil down and looked at her.

“Maybe four, in fact,” she added.

“Let me see if I understand you,” said Dirk. “You say you lost your cat, er, ‘Gusty,’ while you’ve been standing here talking to me?” “No. I lost him—or sort of half-lost him—two weeks ago. But I last saw him, which is what you asked, just before I came into your office. I just checked to see he was okay.

Which he was. Well, sort of okay. If you can call it okay.” “And ... er, where was he, exactly, when you checked to see that he was okay?”

She went out of the room and returned with a medium-sized wickerwork cat box. She put it down on Dirk’s desk. Its contents mewed slightly. She closed the door behind her.

Dirk frowned.

“Excuse me if I’m being a little obtuse,” he said, looking round the basket at her. “Tell me which bit of this I’ve got wrong. It seems to me that you are asking me if I will exercise my professional skills to search for and if possible find and return to you a cat ...”

“Yes.”

“... which you already have with you in a cat basket?”

“Well, that’s right up to a point.”

“And which point is that?”

“Have a look for yourself.”

She slid out the metal rod that held the lid in place, reached into the basket, lifted out the cat, and put him down on Dirk’s desk, next to the basket. Dirk looked at him.

He—Gusty—looked at him.

There is a particular disdain with which Siamese cats regard you. Anyone who has accidentally walked in on the Queen cleaning her teeth will be familiar with this feeling.

Gusty looked at Dirk and clearly found him reprehensible in some way. He turned away, yawned, stretched, groomed his whiskers briefly, licked down a small patch of ruffled fur, then leapt lightly off the table and started carefully to examine a splinter of floorboard, which he found to be far more interesting than Dirk.

Dirk stared wordlessly at Gusty.

Up to a point, Gusty looked exactly like a normal Siamese cat. Up to a point. The point up to which Gusty looked like a normal Siamese cat was his waist, which was marked by a narrrow, cloudy grey band.

“The front half looks quite well,” said Melinda whatever-her-name-was in a small voice. “Quite sleek and healthy, really.”

“And the back half?” said Dirk.

“Is what I want you to look for.”

“It isn’t invisible,” said Melinda, picking the cat up, awkwardly. “It’s actually not there.” She passed her hand back and forth through clear air, where the cat’s hindquarters should have been. The cat twisted and turned in her grip, mewling crossly, then leapt nimbly to the ground and stalked about in an affronted manner.

“My, my,” said Dirk, steepling his fingers under his chin. “That is odd.”

“You’ll take the case?”

“No,” said Dirk. He pushed the pad of paper away from him. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t be doing this sort of stuff. If there’s anything I want less than to find a cat, it’s to find half a cat. Suppose I was unfortunate enough to find it. What then? How am I supposed to go about sticking it on? I’m sorry, but I’m through with cats, and I am definitely through with anything that even smacks of the supernatural or paranormal. I’m a rational being, and I ... excuse me.” The phone was ringing. Dirk answered it. He sighed. It was Thor, the ancient Norse God of Thunder. Dirk knew immediately it was him from the long, portentous silence and the low grumblings of irritation followed by strange, distant bawling noises. Thor did not understand phones very well. He would usually stand ten feet away and shout godlike commands at them. This worked surprisingly well as far as making the connection was concerned, but made actual conversation well-nigh impossible.

Thor had moved in with an American girl of Dirk’s acquaintance, and Dirk understood from the strange Icelandic proclamations echoing over the line that he, Dirk, was supposed to be turning up for tea that afternoon. Dirk said that, yes, he knew that, that he would be there at about five, was looking forward to it and would see him later; but Thor, of course, could hear none of this from where he was standing, and was beginning to get angry and shout a lot.

Dirk had at last to give up and hesitantly put the phone down, hoping that Thor would not do too much damage in Kate’s small flat. She had, he knew, managed to persuade the big god to try to crush packets of crisps in his rages rather than actual sofas and motorbikes, but it was sometimes touch-and-go when he really couldn’t get the hang of what was going on.

Dirk felt oppressed. He looked up. Oh yes.

“No,” he said. “Go away. I can’t deal with any more of this stuff.”

“But, Mr. Gently, I hear you have something of a reputation in this area.” “And that’s precisely what I want to get rid of. So please get out of here and take your bifurcated feline with you.”

“Well, if that’s your attitude ...”

She picked up the cat basket and sauntered out. The half-cat made a pretty good go of sauntering out as well.

Dirk sat at his desk and simmered for a minute or two, wondering why he was so out of sorts today.

Looking out of his window, he saw the extremely attractive and intriguing client he had just rudely turned away out of sheer grumpiness. She looked particularly gorgeous and alluring as she hurried across the road towards a black London taxicab.

“YOU JUST MISSED THOR, I’m afraid,” said Kate Schechter. “He suddenly went off in a fit of Nordic angst about something or other.”

She waved a hand vaguely at the gaping, jagged hole in the window that overlooked Primrose Hill.

“Probably gone to the zoo to stare at elks again. He’ll turn up again in a few hours, full of beer and remorse and carrying a large pane of glass that won’t fit. So he’ll then get upset about that and break something else.”

“We had a bit of a misunderstanding on the phone, I’m afraid,” said Dirk. “But I don’t really know how to avoid them.”

“You can’t,” said Kate. “He’s not a happy god. It’s not his world. Never will be, either.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Oh, there’s plenty to do. Just repairing things keeps me busy.” It wasn’t what Dirk meant, but he realised she knew that and didn’t probe. She went into the kitchen to fetch the tea at that point anyway.

He subsided into an elderly armchair and peered around the small flat. He noticed that there was now quite a collection of books on Norse mythology stacked on Kate’s desk, all sprouting numerous bookmarks and annotated record cards. She was obviously doing her best to master the situation. But one book, buried about four inches into the wall, and obviously flung there by superhuman force, gave some idea of the sort of difficulties she was up against.

“Don’t even ask,” she said, when she returned bearing tea. “Tell me what’s going on with you instead.”

“I did something this afternoon,” he said, stirring the pale, sickly tea and suddenly remembering that, of course, Americans had no idea how to make it, “that was incredibly stupid.”

“I thought you seemed a bit grim.”

“Probably the cause rather than the effect. I’d had an appalling week, plus I had indigestion, and I suppose it made me a bit ...”

“Don’t tell me. You met a very attractive and desirable woman and were incredibly pompous and rude to her.”

Dirk stared at her. “How did you know that?” he breathed.

“You do it all the time. You did it to me.”

“I did not!” protested Dirk.

“You certainly did!”

“No, no, no.”

“I promise you, you ...”

“Hang on,” interrupted Dirk. “I remember now. Hmm. Interesting. And you’re saying I do that all the time?”

“Maybe not all the time. Presumably you have to get some sleep occasionally.”

“But you claim that, typically, I’m rude and pompous to attractive women?” He wrestled his way up out of the armchair and fished around in his pocket for a notebook. “I didn’t mean you to get quite so serious about it, it’s not exactly a major ... well, now I come to think about it I suppose it probably is a major character flaw. What are you doing?”

“Oh, just making a note. Odd thing about being a private detective—you spend your time finding out little things about other people that nobody else knows, but then you discover that there are all sorts of things that everybody else knows about you, which you don’t. For instance, did you know that I walk in an odd way? A kind of strutting waddle, someone described it as.” “Yes, of course I do. Everybody who knows you knows that.” “Except me, you see,” said Dirk. “Now that I know I’ve been trying to catch myself at it as I walk past shop windows. Doesn’t work, of course. All I ever see is myself frozen mid-stride with one foot in the air and gaping like a fish. Anyway, I’m drawing up a little list, to which I have now added, ‘Am always extremely rude and pompous to attractive women.’ ” Dirk stood and looked at the note for a second or two.

“You know,” he said, thoughtfully, “that could explain an astonishing number of things.”

“Oh come on,” said Kate. “You’re taking this a bit literally. I just meant I’ve noticed that when you’re not feeling good, or you’re on the spot in some way, you tend to get defensive, and that’s when you ...

are you writing all this down as well?”

“Of course. It’s all useful stuff. I might end up mounting a full-scale investigation into myself. Damn all else to do at the moment.” “No work?”

“No,” said Dirk, gloomily.

Kate tried to give him a shrewd look, but he was staring out of the window. “And is the fact that you don’t have any work connected in any way to the fact that you were very rude to an attractive woman?”

“Just barging in like that,” muttered Dirk half to himself.

“Don’t tell me,” said Kate, “She wanted you to look for a lost cat.” “Oh no,” said Dirk. “Not even as grand as that. Gone are the days when I used to have entire cats to look for.”

“What do you mean?”

Dirk described the cat. “See what I have to contend with?” he added.

Kate stared at him. “You’re not serious!”

“I am,” he said.

“Half a cat?”

“Yes. Just the back half.”

“I thought you said the front half?”

“Oh no, she’s got that. That was there alright. She only wanted me to look for the back half.” Dirk stared thoughtfully at London over the raised rim of his china teacup.

Kate looked at him suspicously. “But isn’t that ... very, very, very weird?” Dirk turned and faced her.

“I would say,” he declared, “that it was the single most weird and extraordinary phenomenon I have witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing weird and extraordinary phenomena. Unfortunately,” he added, turning away again “I wasn;t in the mood for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had indigestion. I’m always bad tempered when I’ve got indigestion.”

“And just because of that you—”

“It was more than that. I’d lost the piece of paper, too.”

“What piece of paper?”

“That I wrote down her appointment on. Turned up under a pile of bank statements.”

“Which you never open or look at.”

Dirk frowned and opened his notebook again. “Never open bank statements” he wrote thoughtfully.

“So, when she arrived,” he continued after he put the book back in his pocket, “I wasn’t expecting her, so I wasn’t in command of the situation. Which meant that ...” he fished out his notebook and wrote in it again.

“Now what are you putting?” asked Kate.

“Control freak,” said Dirk. “My first instinct was to make her sit down, then pretend to get on with something while I composed myself. I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair—God knows where it had gone—which meant that she had to stand over me, which I also hate. Thats when I turned really ratty.” He peered at his notebook again and flipped through it.

“Strange convergence and tiny little events, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, here was a case of the most extraordinary kind. A beautiful, intelligent, and obviously well-off woman arrives and offers to pay me to investigate a phenomenon that challenges the very foundation of everything that we know of physics and biology, and I ... turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”

everything that we know of physics and biology, and I ... turn it down. Astonishing. Normally, you’d have to nail me to the floor to keep me away from a case like that. Unless—” he added thoughtfully, waving his notebook slowly in the air, “unless you knew me this well.”

”

“Well, I don’t know. The whole sequence of little obstacles would have been completely invisible except for one thing. When I eventually found the piece of paper I’d written her details on, the phone number was missing. The bottom of the sheet of paper had been torn off. So I have no easy way of finding her.”

“Well, you could try calling directory information. What’s her name?”

“Smith. Hopeless. But don’t you think it odd that the number had been torn off?” “No, not really, if you want an honest answer. People tear off scraps of paper all the time. I can see you’re probably in the mood to construct some massive space/time bending conspiracy theory out of it, but I suspect you just tore off a strip of paper to clean your ears out with.”

“You’d worry about space/time if you’d seen that cat.”

“Maybe you just need to get your contact lenses cleaned.”

“I don’t wear contact lenses.”

“Maybe it’s time you did.”

Dirk sighed. “I suppose there are times when my imaginings do get a little overwrought,” he said. “I’ve just had too little to do recently. Business has been so slow, I’ve even been reduced to looking up to see if they’d got my number right in the Yellow Pages and then calling it myself just to check that it was working. Kate ... ?”

“Yes, Dirk?”

“You would tell me if you thought I was going mad or anything, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“Are they?” mused Dirk. “Are they? You know, I’ve often wondered. The reason I ask is that when I phoned myself up ...”

“Yes?”

“I answered.”

“Dirk, old friend,” said Kate, “you need a rest.”

“I’ve had nothing but rest,” grumbled Dirk.

“In which case you need something to do.”

“Yes,” said Dirk. “But what?”

Kate sighed. “I can’t tell you what to do, Dirk. No one can ever tell you anything. You never believe anything unless you’ve worked it out for yourself.” “Hmmm,” said Dirk, opening his notebook again.

“Now that is an interesting one.”

“JOSH,” said a voice in a kind-of Swedish-Irish accent.

Dirk ignored it. He unloaded his small bag of shopping into bits of his badly disfigured kitchen. It was mostly frozen pizza, so it mostly went into his small freezer cabinet, which mostly filled with old, white, clenched things that he was now too frightened to try to identify.

“Jude,” said the Swedish-Irish voice.

“Don’t make it bad,” hummed Dirk to himself. He turned on the radio for the six-o’clock news. It featured mostly gloomy stuff. Pollution, disaster, civil war, famine, etc., and, just as an added bonus, speculation as to whether the Earth was going to be hit by a giant comet or not.

“Julian,” said the Swedish-Irish voice, tinnily. Dirk shook his head. Surely not.

More on the comet story: there was a wide range of views about precisely what was going to happen.

Some authorities said that it was going to hit Sheridan, Wyoming, on the seventeenth of June. NASA

scientists said that it would burn up in the upper atmosphere and not reach the surface. A team of Indian astronomers said that it would miss the Earth altogether by several million miles before going on to plunge into the sun. The British authorities said it would do whatever the Americans said it would do.

“Julio,” said the voice. No response.

Dirk missed the next thing the radio said because of the noise of his front wall flapping. His front wall was made of large, thick sheets of polythene these days, because of an incident a few weeks earlier when, in a radical departure from the sort of behaviour that Dirk’s neighbours liked to see, a Tornado jet fighter had exploded out of the front of Dirk’s house and then plunged screaming into Finsbury.

There was, of course, a perfectly logical explanation for this, and Dirk was tired of giving it. The reason that Dirk had had a Tornado jet fighter in his hallway was that he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. Of course he hadn’t known it was a Tornado jet fighter. As far as he was concerned, it was merely a large and bad-tempered eagle that he had trapped in his hallway the same way anybody would to stop it dive-bombing him the whole time. That a large Tornado jet fighter had, for a brief while, taken on the shape of an eagle was on account of an unfortunate airborne encounter with the Thunder God, Thor, of legend, and ...

This was the part of the story where Dirk usually had to struggle a little to sustain his audience’s patient attention, which he would, if successful, further strain by explaining that the Thunder God, Thor, had then thought better of his fit of temper and decided to put things right by returning the Tornado to its proper shape. Unfortunately, Thor, being a god, had had his mind on higher or at least other things, and hadn’t called up, as any mere mortal might have done, to check if this was a convenient moment. He had just decreed it done and it was done, bang.

Devastation.

And also the insurance problem from hell. The insurance companies involved had all claimed that this was, by any reasonable standards, an act of God. But, Dirk had argued, which god? Britain was constitutionally a Christian monotheistic state, and therefore any “act of God” defined in a legal document must refer to the Anglican chap in the stained glass and not to some polytheistic thug from Norway. And so on.

“Justin,” intoned the little voice. There was no answering response. Dirk tipped his unopened bank statements on to the kitchen table, and stared at them with loathing. It seemed to him for a moment that the envelopes were vibrating slightly, and even that the whole of space and time was beginning to revolve slowly around them and get sucked into their event horizon, but he was probably imagining it.

“Karl.” Nothing. “Karel. Keir.” Nothing. Nothing.

Dirk made some coffee, taking the long route round his kitchen, in order to avoid coming too close to his bank statements, now that he had put them down. Viewed in a certain light, the entire structure of his adult life could be seen as a means of avoiding opening his bank statements. Someone else’s bank statements—now that was a different matter. He was rarely happier than when poring over someone else’s bank statements: he always found them to be rich in colour and narrative drive, particularly if he’d had to steam them open. But the prospect of opening his own gave him the screaming heebie-jeebies.

“Keith,” said the voice, hopefully, nasally. Nothing.

“Kelvin.” No.

Dirk poured his coffee as slowly as he could, for he realised that the time had finally come. He had to open the statements and learn the worst. He selected the largest knife he could find and advanced on them, theateningly. “Kendall.” Silence.

In the end he did it almost nonchalantly, with a sadistic little flick-slit movement. He quite enjoyed it, in fact, and even felt fashionably vicious. In a few seconds the four envelopes—his financial history of the last four months—were open. Dirk laid their contents out before him. “Kendrick.” Nothing.