a Conversation that could get you killed, pt. I. ch. 4

(Ernst Kirchner, "Cafe in Davos" - 1928)

Mrs. Rhodes was unsatisfied. Every inquiry into the progress of the case ended in vague assurances and bad accents. This seemed to her, quite clearly, to be a murder over something that her son had written. Someone was needed to delve deep into Quintin’s body of work and interpret his articles to the point of finding the killer. She decided to hire a poet to discover the exact circumstances of her only son’s death. Only a poet would have the literary know-how to extract the meaning of what Quintin had recorded, and thereby determine who would go as far as murder to cover that meaning up.

The poet was a young man who lied to get the job. He was not really a poet, though he always wanted to be. Mrs. Rhodes hired him on the spot because he was unshaven and seemed desperate (her definition of a writer), and he was fidgety in a way that reminded her of Quintin. He listened to her instructions, accepted the check, put on his reading glasses and boarded an icy train to Montreal.

The phony poet arrived late and found a subteranean city hiding from winter. If he was going to be a poet, he decided, he should be cold and alone, so he walked the empty, snow covered streets heading north to Quintin’s apartment. On the way he took brief refuge in a convenience store to prepare the essential tools of the task at hand – Red Bull, cigarettes, number two pencils, a thick red marker, under the counter ritalin, a couple of lighters and a box of matches. He may not have been the brilliant, accomplished poet Mrs. Rhodes believed, but that did not mean he wouldn’t try. For even though he had never written a single poem in his life, this was not his first encounter with literary analysis.

He stepped into Quintin’s apartment to find the crime-scene still intact. He picked up one of the discarded pages on the floor and read the dialogue of a young couple in a sushi restaurant.
The phony poet spent the night sorting through the accumulated debris of Quintin’s articles. He began to realize the arduous task of discovering motive in the scattered dialogues. As he stood there, in the chaos of loose pages, the phony poet made a choice which he knew to be imperfect. He decided that the killer was somewhere on this floor. He knew this to be a hasty assumption for the following reasons:

1) It was possible that this was a murder of revenge, not a cover-up, and that the killer was actually a figure in one of the articles Quintin had already published.

2) It was possible that the killer had retrieved the paper on which he was implicated after having murdered Quintin.

3) It was possible that this murder had nothing to with anything Quintin had written at all.

Nonetheless, the phony poet made his choice that night.

There was no use wasting time and going mad in the realm of endless possibilities. He decided that after beating Quintin to death with his typewriter, the murderer was unable to sift through all this unpublished work and find that page on which he was implicated. In frustration of not being able to carry all the pages, or perhaps confident that it didn’t really matter (since there were so many!), the killer left them scattered on the floor. It wasn’t a perfect theory, but it was a start.

The phony poet ordered Chinese food and began to categorize the recorded dialogues according to a vague system of threachery. He read each page carefully and then asked himself: could this get you killed? If the answer was no, he placed the page to his left. If the answer was yes, he placed it to his right. And if the answer was maybe, he left the sheet in limbo between the two piles. As he did this he began to reconstruct the sounds of a city built of tiny intimacies. On their own, anywhere else, they would have flickered and died away. But joined together in the confines of Quintin’s bloody room, these forgotten dialogues found a more lasting quality. They achieved survival, if not permanence.