a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 5

(Ernst Kirchner, "Self-portrait as a Soldier" - 1919)

The next morning, at 7:29 am, Jean Jacques dropped like a soldier shot through the knees at the sight of his precious crime-scene. The mystery hidden in the angles of the scattered sheets had been neatly ordered into three distinct piles. The logic of the dance was gone. He found the furniture moved, strange red writing on the walls, and chinese take-out littered across the floor. Fifteen mintutes later, Jean Francois arrived with coffee and a baguette. He snapped the baguette in two and joined his wounded partner on the floor.

» Pourquoi!? » he demanded.

» Je ne sais pas. »

« Peut-etre que l ‘ours est revenu? »

But they both knew that wasn’t it. The imposed order, the strange red markings, the scent of soy-sauce and marijuana – no, this was not the work of the bear-like man; this was something else.

« Les Polonais? » Jean Francois suggested.

« Surement. »

The francophone detectives spent the entire day recreating the crime-scene and cursing the Polish neighbours. They washed the red writing on the walls, they used white-out to cover the notes etched onto Quintin’s sheets, they threw away the empty take-out boxes. All that was left was to re-un-order the furniture and re-scatter the sheets based on Jean Jacques’ painstaking diagrams. The clever detectives decided to take this opportunity to re-stage the movements of the crime.

A man sits at his desk and another pounds on the door. The door opens and the two men struggle. The intruder is powerful and pushes the other onto the bed. He confronts the stack of papers but the bear paws make it impossible to sift through the sheets. Enraged, he pulls out the chair and growls at Quintin, commands him to sit down. Quintin hunches over the desk. He’s nervous, or he’s stalling. Maybe he even begins to write something. The bear-like man loses patience. He lifts the typewriter and brings it down, quick and hard, onto Quintin’s head. The boy drops, dead on impact. The bear-like man panics, pushes the pages onto the floor. He gets desperate, falls on his paws and knees and searches for the page he needs. He can barely read a word through the makeshift eyes in his suit; but he doesn’t dare take it off. He tries to gather all the sheets into his big furry arms but it’s no use, they slip and they fall. He picks up the typewriter and thinks of taking it, but no, it’s not necessary. There’s no identifying marks, only the blood of a boy who’s dead. Through the walls he hears swearing in Polish, and the depressed shuffling of existentialists coming down the stairs. He takes one final look at what he’s done and races out of the room, out of the building, into the wilderness of the night.

Jean Jacques and Jean Francois re-enacted the scene again and again, at different speeds, switching roles, testing theories and making adjustments each time.

They left the room in the late-afternoon, as near as possible to the way it was the moment the bear-like man swung a typewriter and fled the scene. They knew that the room was all they had. The further the fragile pieces of the room slipped into some other disarray, the further they would find themselves removed from the truth.