bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2005) — Spring 2005 // Printemps 2005, pp. 39–43
The call came just in time. We were playing strip Parcheesi with Regis Philbin, Madonna and Attila the Hun. They still had all their clothes, but Effie and I were down to our unmentionables (and in one case our untouchables). Just rolled another 2 when the phone woke me. I lit a candle to Alexander Graham Bell and picked up.
It was my old partner, Elwood B Fedora. We split up years ago over his obsession with Dan Ackroyd and his inability to accept Effie’s fashion sense. But we kept in touch. “Help me, Shamus,” he rasped. “I’m at CFSI. Weird things are happening. I’m not sure I’ll make it.” A moan and the line went dead. I ran to the back room to get Effie. He was trying to speed up the Arctic birds that we use as carrier pigeons (better in the Ottawa winter) by feeding them recreational pharmaceuticals. He said he was leaving no tern unstoned. I didn’t strangle him, but only because I needed his help.
We soon pulled up at the Centre de formation du service international (CFSI), where the Minister was hosting a high-tone event. Chaos ruled in the dining room. In one corner, six young waiters were belting out “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar”. At the main table, a well-coiffed man was facedown in his crème brûlée. A chair held a three-foot rutabaga in pink chiffon. A well-known politician was loudly imitating her boss (“The trouble with the French, Tony, is that they have no word for entrepreneur,” in a voice like a Texas chipmunk). A man laughed heartily at nothing and another was naked, revealing a body covered with square green spots. “Just another diplomatic dinner,” Effie yawned. But then we saw Elwood’s crumpled body. He wasn’t breathing.
A fussy little man gesticulated wildly. A hammerlock calmed him down. He claimed to be Dryan Tweedie, Sultan of SuWaNee. A guest lecturer on obscure poisons, he had been passing by when he heard the hubbub. “I poked my head in and saw several of my students, moonlighting as waiters,” he said. “I also noticed that the diners were in bad shape, in ways I recognized from my course. They had clearly been poisoned with my two-part compounds – chemicals with lethal or incapacitating effects, but only if two different ones are ingested at the same time. One compound has either a lesser effect or none, and three compounds taken together always cancel each other out.” He gave me a chart that described the effects. He pointed to Elwood and said, “That man was killed by a combination of compound D and either compound A or compound B.”
Having no reason not to, we phoned the police. A freak storm had dumped 3 metres of snow since we arrived and they would be delayed, so for now it was up to us. I sent Effie to settle accounts with the waiters and Tweedie to grill the kitchen staff, while I sat down to read Elwood’s notebook. As I expected, it described the diners.
The guest of honour, Sympathy Maze, was the State Secretary of a large neighbouring country. A conservative, she had boosted her standing among neo-cons by pushing a pre-emptive invasion of Tibet, claiming that the Dalai Lama had weapons of mass destruction. Despite a total lack of evidence on that score, plus the fact that Tibet had no oil, that it belonged to China and that the Lama didn’t live there anymore, Operation “Hello Dalai” was a go. But the Secretary had been threatened by a radical faction of the International Congress of Logicians, desperate to re-establish the rule (or even the suggestion) of cause-and-effect in the foreign policy of her country.
Deputy Minister Travis Fonebone was the power behind the controversial project for inter-departmental divorce (and not necessarily as a result of foreign affairs). He wanted to break up a marriage of institutions rather than the institution of marriage, but his strong stand made him enemies among confused clerics. His life had in fact been threatened by a religious fringe group known as Opera Dei (Motto: “Fear, surprise and a fanatical devotion to Verdi”). But many suspected that the real threat came from the anti-religious Freedixons (Motto: “I think lost a finger in that last secret handshake”) who wanted to frame the killing on their rivals in the Opera.
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John Ralston Purina (“the philosopher consort”) was there to mark the 1000th version of the Intentionally Political Statement, which he had just been hired to draft. The latest press leaks were optimistic. The PM was said to be ready to accept any IPS that supported the L-20 and didn’t mention BMD. The Minister had also come on board after a promise
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› Self-directed RSPs / Tax shelters / Mutual funds / Stocks / Bonds / GICS / ESPs / Portfolio management from head drafter Rufus Hornswoggle that the lOth floor would never again be briefed on it (two Ministerial aides and an aspidistra were still recovering from the 997th version). Purina’s life had been threatened by anxiety-ridden policy planners, desperate to see the IPS completed some time before the heat death of the universe.
Fedora was there as a body double for Hannibal McAlpine, who forced the unification of the Montgomery and Horror enquiries by showing that security agencies had actually planned to deport ex- Minister Adolphus Gabriola and sidekick Duck Guitar, along with seventeen crates of exploding signature golf-balls, to an unnamed Middle East country. Wires clearly got crossed, but the agencies still denied error, on grounds that it was better to be seen as fanatic than incompetent. From fear that McAlpine would be killed (either by extreme elements in the agencies or by tabloids enraged at seeing two great stories fold into one), Fedora was hired to replace McAlpine in public appearances.
The impersonation included dressing in Scottish costume. Effie joined me at this point and said, “Now I know why you’re driven to get to the bottom of things. When a man’s partner gets a kilt, he’s supposed to do something.” Effie’s own report confirmed that there were six waiters, three male (Allen, Carlos and Edouard) and three female (Beverly, Daphne and Fu-ling). Each served only one diner. The diners were seated, equally spaced, at a round table. To help the novice waiters, the seats were discreetly numbered I to 6, clockwise. Effie handed me a menu, but said that the diner’s choices were known well in advance. Each guest had one soup, ate one appetizer, one entree and one dessert, and drank one of the wines. Effie had also extracted the following disjointed information from the clearly hammered waiters:
I. Purina was one of the four diners who chose the stone soup, one of the two who chose the sea bass and one of the four who drank the shiraz.
2. Beverly and Allen both served deer to their diners.
One of the men who ate prof- ¡teroles sat between two women who ate crème brûlée. Fonebone, the only diner served by a waiter of the same gender, was one of the three diners who ate the duck pâté, one of the three who ate deer and one of the three who ordered profiteroles.
Fedora, the dead man in seat o, was served shiraz and ate profiteroles.
The man across from Maze had the Vichysoise, the vegetarian entrée (the only one to do so) and the crème brûlée.
Soeur-Tordue, who had turned into a rutabaga, sat across from the diner served by Edouard; both of these diners ate the stone soup and drank the sauvignon.
The Minister (seat I) was served by Daphne and fell asleep in his dessert.
9. Carlos served his diner the stone soup, the salmon, the sea bass and the shiraz.
10. The woman performing compulsive imitations had the man served by Fu-ling on her right and the man who had broken out in square green spots on her left.
I. The man who couldn’t stop laughing had eaten the pâté, as had the only man who sat between two others.
Dryan Tweedie came up to us and said. “What a farrago! I’ve analyzed the food and there’s poison in almost half the choices. The chef admitted that a stranger bribed him to put Compound B in one of the appetisers. The same person bribed the pastry cook to put Compound D in one of the desserts. Separately, the vintner behind the sauvignon blanc bribed the sommelier to put Compound E in the shiraz — acting alone, it just makes red wine taste bad. None of the three men balked, since the compounds aren’t lethal on their own. Then a waiter, in a career-limiting move of epic proportions, spiked one of the entrees with Compound C, which makes people very drunk, and also shared the compound with the other waiters. And the sous-chef added Compound A to one of the soups as a flavour-enhancer; it’s available in stores and normally harmless.
“The man who bribed the cooks was the murderer. If no other compounds had been added to the dinner, only one diner would have died, since no-one else got both B and D. Even adding A, C and E, the same diner would have been killed and no-one else affected, since the others would get either no compounds or three. BUT it gets more complicated. The sommelier imbibed too much from his own cellar and put compound E in the sauvignon instead of the shiraz. (E has no effect on white wine, so no-one noticed.) At the same time, the appetizers chosen by the diners in seats 2 and 5 were accidentally switched (the only such error), but the diners in question ate what they were given. The result was that the wrong guest died. At the same time, each of the other diners got exactly two compounds in their food, with the results you saw.”
Effie and I stared at him, stunned. I hadn’t been that confused since Bertha de Kuhl put LSD in my sinus medicine (I kept blowing my nose and my mind at the same time). Effie cleared his throat and asked Tweedie which soup, appetizer, entrée and dessert each compounds had been placed in. The sultan shrugged. “Actually, I forgot to ask. But it should be simple to deduce.” He smiled innocently as I did a slow burn.
We pulled it off anyway. Effie and I first worked out the diner’s name and affliction, the waiter’s name and the list of food served at each place around the table. Tweedie’s chart told us the two compounds each diner must have taken, and therefore which dishes must have been spiked. Finally, by reversing the two slip-ups, we could work out the real intended victim. When Sergeant Tennant arrived, we told him where to look for the murderer.
Two months later, Effie and I visited Elwood’s grave. We wore black Armani and shades. By then, the murderer had been caught, agreement reached on the union contract and the IPS released. But too late for Elwood. Ironically, after a life full of danger, he had been killed by mistake. Pouring three shots of the office rye, I toasted his memory with the words he had lived by: “It’s 106 miles to Chicago. We’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.” Effie replied, “We’re on a mission from God” and smashed the third glass on the tombstone as we tossed off the others. Turning away, I though I saw Elwood’s ’57 Caddie misting through the birches at the cemetery’s edge. But maybe not.
Can you duplicate the feat of Shamus, Effie and Tweedie by naming the real intended victim? Not necessary for the answer, can you fill in the chart specifying the data for each position at the table and identify the dish in which Compounds A to D were placed (E was of course in the sauvignon blanc)? Can you cite the sources of Effie’s comment on the kilt and the eulogy for Elwood? And can you suggest a way to ensure that Mme Soeur- Tordue does not become part of CFSI’s next ratatouille? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a box containing all correct entries received by July 15, 2005. The winner will receive a book autographed by A Aalto.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2005) — Spring 2005 // Printemps 2005, pp. 39–43. Read the rest of this issue →
