boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

The Anomaly of the Empty Man 299
low husk … ?”
“Not just why, Lamb. How.”
“How? That should be easy enough to—”
“Try it. Try fitting sleeves into sleeves, pants into pants, so they’re as smooth
and even as if they were still on the body. I’ve tried, with the rest of the wardrobe.
It doesn’t work.”
I had an idea. “You don’t fit ’em in,” I said smugly. “You take ’em off. Look.”
I unbuttoned my coat and shirt, undid my tie, and pulled everything off at once.
“See,” I said; “sleeves in sleeves.” I unzipped and stepped out of trousers and shorts.
“See; pants in pants.”
Inspector Abrahams was whistling the refrain of Strip Polka. “You missed your
career, Lamb,” he said. “Only now you’ve got to put your shirt tails between the outer
pants and the inner ones and still keep everything smooth. And look in here.” He
lifted up one shoe and took out a pocket flash and shot a beam inside. “The sock’s
caught on a little snag in one of the metal eyelets. That’s kept it from collapsing,
and you can still see the faint impress of toes in there. Try slipping your foot out of
a laced-up shoe and see if you can get that result.”
I was getting dressed again and feeling like a damned fool.
“Got any other inspirations?” Abrahams grinned.
“The only inspiration I’ve got is as to where to go now.”
“Some day,” the Inspector grunted, “I’ll learn where you go for your extra-bright
ideas.”
“As the old lady said to the elephant keeper,” I muttered, “you wouldn’t believe
me if I told you.”
The Montgomery Block (Monkey Block to natives) is an antic and reboantic warren of
offices and studios on the fringe of Grant Avenue’s Chinatown and Columbus Avenue’s
Italian-Mexican-French-Basque quarter. The studio I wanted was down a long corridor,
beyond that all-American bend where the Italian newspaper Corriere del Popolo
sits cater-corner from the office of Tinn Hugh Yu, Ph.D. and Notary Public.
Things were relatively quiet today in Dr. Verner’s studio. Slavko Catenich was still
hammering away at his block of marble, apparently on the theory that the natural
form inherent in the stone would emerge if you hit it often enough. Irma Borigian
was running over vocal exercises and occasionally checking herself by striking a note
on the piano, which seemed to bring her more reassurance than it did me. Those
two, plus a couple of lads industriously fencing whom I’d never seen before, were
the only members of Verner’s Varieties on hand today.
Irma ah-ah-ahed and pinked, the fencers clicked, Slavko crashed, and in the
midst of the decibels the Old Man stood at his five-foot lectern-desk, resolutely
proceeding in quill-pen longhand with the resounding periods of The Anatomy of
Nonscience, that never-concluded compendium of curiosities which was half Robert
Burton and half Charles Fort.
He gave me the medium look. Not the hasty “Just this sentence” or the forbidding
“Dear boy, this page must be finished”; but the in-between “One more deathless
paragraph” look. I grabbed a chair and tried to watch Irma’s singing and listen to
Slavko’s sculpting.