Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch. Louis Shalako.

Mommsen: history is a moral question.

Louis Shalako

Archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch.

 

The great thing about archaeology in the Anthropocene Epoch is that you really don’t have to dig down all that far.

I was digging a garden, some years ago, probably digging down a foot or so into rich, black humus, and all of a sudden, I was coming up with all kinds of marbles, and green plastic army men. The propeller from a Cox 0.49 airplane engine. Bits of a plastic model car. That was out behind my old man’s garage, on Bright St.; here in Sarnia.

Imagine digging down about forty years and finding your own artifacts—pieces of your own life, buried there in the dirt. As Mommsen said, ‘history is a moral question’, but it is also a philosophical question…looking at my own past life, so to speak.

I’m not too sure of how I got here, but this is where I came from.

The modern equivalent of the good old shell midden is right outside our back door, in some cases.

Your typical thrift store, in any city or town in this nation, is literally riddled with artifacts of a kind. Every one of those artifacts has its own story, and collectively, they tell a bigger and more complex story.

It is a very human story.

The Anthropocene is the story of what human beings have done to this planet, outside of all other natural causes. Essentially, we can’t really shift tectonic plates, but what we can do, is to cut down forests, build great cities and pump out all kinds of products…including waste products.

What is a shell midden?

We don’t have to wait five thousand years before going back in time and digging up our own time and place. It exists, right here and right now, and all we have to do is to look about us—at the world we have created.

This is the world we are living in, right now.

Five thousand years from now, they will live in a different world. Five thousand years from now, they will dig down, and discover that the entire world was wrapped in a sheet of plastic a hundred metres deep, too.

You can build a pretty good picture of a society by sifting through their trash bins…

In any ditch, you will find pop cans and beer bottles, broken baby carriages and sacks of clothing, auto parts and the skeletons of roadkill. This gives us a pretty good picture of the life of the day, which includes proper drainage of farmland, high-speed roads and vehicles, and an established infrastructure—all very obvious, and so no one observes it. No one really analyzes it from the archaeological, the cultural point of view. You could trace an entire ancient road system, just by following the trail of crap in the ditches.

This is, clearly, an abundant society, also, a wasteful one. Great resources are being squandered, and it’s like no one has a second thought.

This is a wealthy society indeed, and a well-fed one, considering the human race has gained, in the collective sense, several inches in average height, and a good hundred pounds in terms of the average weight over the last century. This is an evolutionary response to a social change, (and chemical changes in the food we eat), in the sense that the world is growing more food, more efficiently—all those hands, all those workers, and rather contradicting of Malthusian economics. But of course we have so much better technology now. The oxen and the plough have been replaced by the combine and the skilled modern farmer. Immigration, has replaced the higher birth-rates, that in the past would have naturally grown or at least replaced, the national populations. Lower birthrates are a feature, and not a bug, of technologically-advanced civilizations. Nowadays, four out of five births reach five years of age, which is a complete reversal of medieval populations, and as long as more babies survive, there is less need to produce more.

Kids are expensive, as any parent can tell you.

What is Malthusian Theory.

We don’t actually have to dig down in the here and now, in order to realize that archaeologists of the future will be digging up skeletons with breast and bum implants, or teeth that sit on metal posts, or had electronic tickers for the heart, or a chip in the brain, or that men will be buried in their toupees, or that a skeleton might have three steel pins in an ankle. It does say quite a bit about the medical science of our day.

Still searching for the Ark of the Covenant.

We might even feel a little sorry, for the archaeologist who digs into some old mound and finds nothing but tires, tires, millions of tires, ladies and gentlemen. Tires waiting for recycling, and in too many cases, that will never happen.

They might even think of us as Mound Builders, which is apt enough.

The real irony is that these are not centres of worship, but symbols of desecration.

It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to realize that archaeologists, historians, scientists of the future won’t have too much trouble figuring out what we have done with our atmosphere, our soils, our water, our climate—and why. This includes our social structures and institutions that have enabled such obscenity, for surely that is what it is.

We have the best educated and the best-informed society in all of history. We have all of the information that we require, in order to make good decisions. And never, in all of history, have we been so wilfully blind, and to show such little wisdom in the care and maintenance of what is rightfully to be held in trust for all of humanity.

We hold this Earth in trust for future generations.

We should try and remember this of all things.

And in the meantime...

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

A Little Chunk of History.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

A Little Chunk of History. Louis Shalako.

A rendering of an archaic longhouse.

Louis Shalako

If I should ever fail as a writer, I shall surely go back to my first love, which was archaeology.

(Which is kind of sad when you think about it, but that would be a story for another day.)

I blame the Bookmobile of elementary school days, and Louis Leakey and the Olduvai Gorge; which I read all about as a very small boy…the Bookmobile was a trailer, dropped off in front of our school, regular as clockwork, every Thursday morning, about nine a.m., rain or shine. More importantly, the teachers encouraged us to go out there and have a look, two or three at a time, and if nothing else, it got us out of class and out of the building for a while.

It’s just a little promise that I make to myself sometimes, and the funny thing is, it’s not such a bad idea. I might even look good in the archaeologist’s hat, but I do promise to shave, trim the hair and the eyebrows once in a while, and the odds of good old Tony Robinson, (a.k.a. Baldric), and the Time Team following me around anytime soon would appear to be rather slim.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that my sister gave me this crazy old map, and I was a little startled to see that the bones of a mastodon had been discovered down by the river. Studying that map, I see that more mastodon bones were found near Brigden. It seems that when the glaciers melted around 12,300 years ago, they and other creatures were following along the Wyoming and Seaforth moraines. Primitive man arrived not too far behind, with their spears and their bows and those big brains, which we still enjoy today. I can find the Wyoming moraine. If you leave Wyoming, and head west on Churchill Line, you really can’t miss it: just north of Marthaville, the land climbs, there’s few small dips, and then, voila! You’re looking down from a height, and down below are the flatlands so familiar here in Sarnia-Lambton.

I was interested to learn, that there were ancient Algonkian earthworks in Corunna of all places. These are long since gone, or otherwise inaccessible due to being on private, or industrial land.

...some crazy old map...

Here’s the thing. At some point I was Googling key words and all of a sudden I’m reading a pdf of an archaeological dig in the Thedford area. I’m reading about an Iroquoian village from pre-Columbian times, in the Burley section of Pinery Provincial Park…I’m looking at drawings of arrowheads, and looking at photographs of pottery sherds, some of which had been reconstructed in order to demonstrate the shape of the original piece. I’m looking at site maps, I was looking at photographs of the famed Kettle Point chert, the dominant colour of which turned out to be a surprising shade of yellow, and which was traded all over the Great Lakes. It is, essentially, a kind of flint, and used for arrow points, spear heads, scrapers, and knife-blades.

I’ve actually seen that stuff on the beach, and never even gave it a thought.

The map at least claims, that the final resting place of the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh is on Walpole Island.

This site is typical of Iroquoian culture, it is in Middlesex.

That may be true, I simply don’t know, but this map is a gold mine of information. I won’t name them all, but at various times the Dawn Tramway and the Erie and Huron Railway operated in the south of the county. The Canadian Southern, the Michigan Central. There were half a dozen companies, most of them short-lived, all dating to that golden era of rail and steam.

When you consider the present population of Dawn-Euphemia is less than two thousand people, even the smallest of spur lines seems like a very ambitious project. Ah, but when the roads were muddy tracks through the bush, this was the way the milk, butter and eggs, all those bushels of corn and wheat, got to market.

The other thing was settlement—if you want people to take up and clear the land, build homes, schools and the like, you’re going to have to produce some kind of surplus, and get those products to market. The big economic lesson here is that it was a cash-poor, and credit-poor society. Turnaround from investment in seed to selling a crop was a yearly cycle. The margins must have been very tight. What they did have was land—just land, their own, back-breaking labour, and some kind of a dream, I guess.

When they got around to building that first, one-room schoolhouse, it was a communal effort, where the majority of materials and labour were donated. All they had to do then, was to find the money to pay a teacher, and it would be eight grades, all under one roof.

Next time I go for a walk in the woods, I will definitely be keeping an eye out for mastodon tusks sticking out of the side of a creek, or arrowheads, or fossils, or a piece of chert. Some location, one that looks like the perfect campsite from times immemorial, or almost anything, really. If I find a chunk of history or something, that would be okay too.

Also—

Iroquoian pottery had rounded bottoms. It distributed the heat more evenly, and the pots could rest in soft earth or ashes, as all cooking was done over an open fire. In that sense, I am learning something new every day.

And that, as they say, is archaeology.

 

END

Chert, ladies and gentlemen.

 

Notes.

The Moore Museum is located at 94 Moore Line, Mooretown, Ontario.

The Lambton Heritage Museum is located at 10035 Museum Road, Grand Bend, Ontario.

The former Stones & Bones Museum has found a new home on the second floor of the Sarnia Library, 124 Christina St. South, Sarnia, Ontario. It’s a $3.5 million project, hopefully opening in 2028, and you can donate here. 

Sources indicate the final resting place of Tecumseh has never been proven.

The earliest known use of archery dates back approximately 60,000 years as evidenced by artifacts recovered from Sidubu cave in South Africa.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

Thank you for reading.

 

Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: on Alistair MacLean. Louis Shalako.

"Broadsword calling Danny Boy."

Louis Shalako

 

On Alistair MacLean.

I was just watching the 1979 film of Alistair MacLean’s Bear Island.

It has been said that the quality of his work was uneven. You could say that about any writer, if one compares the first thing they ever wrote against the last thing they ever wrote, along with some of the really great stuff when they were at their peak. Of course their work was variable, and so is mine and so is yours.

Author John Creasy wrote something like six hundred books, and there are a few in there, which I have read, where one wonders how it actually got published in the first place. Truth was, he was grinding them out relentlessly, at the dining room table, and trying to feed a family, when the going rate for a novel might have been a measly twenty-five pounds.

(How in the hell do you even do that? - ed.)

There is a big difference between six hundred books and twenty or thirty, that difference is the luxury of time.

I wanted to talk about Alistair MacLean due to the number of films that were adapted from his works.

First, a little background.

“In 1941, at the age of 19, MacLean was called up to fight in the Second World War with the Royal Navy, serving with the ranks of ordinary seaman, able seaman, and leading torpedo operator. He was first assigned to PS Bournemouth Queen, a converted excursion ship fitted for antiaircraft guns, on duty off the coasts of England and Scotland. Beginning in 1943, he served on HMS Royalist, a Dido-class light cruiser. There, he saw action in 1943 in the Atlantic theatre, on two Arctic convoys and escorting aircraft carrier groups in operations against Tirpitz, and other targets off the Norwegian coast. He took part in Convoy PQ 17 on Royalist. In 1944, Royalist and he served in the Mediterranean theatre, as part of the invasion of southern France and in helping to sink blockade runners off Crete and bombard Milos in the Aegean.” (Wiki)

Where Eagles Dare consistently ranks among the top five war adventure films of all times, and that’s pretty good company to be keeping for any writer. The Guns of Navarone is an acknowledged classic, one I have viewed many times. Force 10 from Navarone, another classic film.

Alistair at about twenty.

In terms of comparisons, River of Death is quite terrible, at least in the film version. And I have read the book, in fact I used to check for new titles at our local mall book shop, way back in the days when we had time, money, and plenty of hair on the old noggin…a leather jacket and a seventeen-hair mustache, if you really want to know.

Fear is the Key, this film has one of the best car chase scenes ever. What might have been described in the book is fully brought to life in this one. MacLean loved sending things over cliffs, for example vehicles in Where Eagles Dare and Guns of Navarone, as well as Bear Island. There are probably others, and this is one reason why they’re called action-adventure stories. Oh, yeah. In Breakheart Pass, a train goes over a cliff.

He wasn't exactly messing around, when it came time for things to go off of cliffs.

H.M.S. Ulysses, his first novel, was based on his wartime experience in the Royal Navy.

This accounts for some of the naval themes, arctic themes, for example Night without End. There are lots of ships in his novels, Golden Rendezvous for example.

The list of actors that have appeared in the films is impressive. Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, Vanessa Redgrave, Harrison Ford, Robert Shaw, Rock Hudson, Charles Bronson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan, Carl Weathers, Lloyd Bridges, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley, Edward Fox, Franco Nero, the list, ladies and gentlemen, goes on and on and on. Barry Newman, Ben Kingsley, John Vernon. Richard Harris and Anne Turkel, Burgess Meredith and David Janssen, John Carradine.

Robert Vaughn and Donald Pleasance and Michael Dudikoff in River of Death, just to name a few more. And I know I’ve left a few out—I had to, there’s just too many films and too many names.

Gregory Peck, David Niven, Richard Widmark, Ed Lauter, Ben Johnson, Charles Durning, Richard Crenna. Gia Scala and Irene Papas. As I said, this is a very long list.

Throw in a hundred more character actors, whose faces you might recognize, and whose names may be vaguely familiar, and you start to get the idea of just how successful Alistair MacLean actually was. Patrick Wymark and Michael Hordern, in Where Eagles Dare, for example, these actors each have very long lists of credits, starring and supporting roles, in film and theatre. Barbara Bach and Michael Byrne in Force 10 from Navarone is (or are), just one more example, then there were Mary Ure and Ingrid Pitt. Jill Ireland.

These are just a few of the ‘vapid females’ (essentially, Bond Girls), in what are called stories ‘of good Englishmen and bad Germans’. Which would appear to be an entire genre in itself, at least when a good writer gets hold of it.

It’s different for everybody of course, but when I read these books and saw the films for the first time, I was a young man, impressionable, an inveterate reader above all else. I soaked it all up like a sponge.

These are the stories that make a young man’s fancy turn towards writing a few stories of his own someday…

The books that kind of stick to your ribs, like soul food for the adventurous home-boy.

When I fantasize about my own humble bookshelves, which I do from time to time, (if only we had money!), this would be one box set I might be willing to pay money for—just for the purposes of study, scholarship, and maybe even stealing a few ideas here and there as a writer myself. Maybe even just learning a little something at the knee of a master. Or maybe it’s just some kind of an escape.

It always was, an escape.

There is nothing wrong with a little escapism, at the time we probably needed it, and there are times when we still do.

In which case, we will always have someplace to go.

I have written a critique of Where Eagles Dare, and you can read it at the link below. I describe it as ‘a series of plot holes flying in close formation’, and yet I still enjoy the film, just as much as I did the book, such a very long time ago.

MacLean figured out how to make it work for him, and perhaps that is the real lesson here. I have no idea of who the reader is, I have no idea if the lesson is relevant to you, although plenty of folks write, and plenty more dream about it just as I did. I can only hope you enjoyed reading this story.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the lesson was for me.

And why not.

I’ve always needed plenty of stimulation.

END

Plenty of stimulation.

Alistair MacLean. (Wiki)

When Eight Bells Toll.

The Golden Rendezvous.

Fear is the Key.

Night Without End.

Breakheart Pass.

Where Eagles Dare: A Series of Plot Holes Flying in Close Formation.

Why I Love Louis L’Amour.

On Agatha Christie.

Louis Shalako has books and stories, ebooks and audiobooks, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading. The blog is acting rather wonky today, and trying to get the text all in the same shade of black has defeated me.

#Louis

 

 

 

 

 

Dead Reckoning, Chapter Twenty-Two. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Their last stop was to Maintenon’s flat. They stood just inside the street-level door. The lock on the mailbox was dead simple. Hubert had the tools and a bit of a knack. Madame had said the key was in a kitchen drawer, and told them exactly which one, but it was good to polish the skills from time to time. Martin held his tongue and waited breathlessly. There was the question of getting caught, and they didn’t have that warrant yet, either. He’d picked it in a half a minute and the actual key for Maintenon’s door hadn’t been all that much quicker. The guts of the lock were worn and he’d had to wiggle and wiggle the key just to make it work. They’d emptied the mailbox, down below, locking it back up again, almost a greater achievement than simply opening it according to Hubert. The lights came on when he snapped the switch, so there was still power. Hubert put that on a corner of the table for the moment after a quick riffle through, looking for overdue bills or whatever. He wasn’t even sure why, not really, but there didn’t appear to be anything interesting anyways. Knowing Gilles, he would have stopped the papers, any magazines and such that he might subscribe to. He would have paid the bills before he left. He would also have been expecting to return in due course.

With the windows closed up for weeks now, the air was musty and still. The first thing to do was to open up a window or two and turn on the tall pedestal fan in the front room.

“Ah, that’s better.”

It was damned warm up there on the third floor.

“Okay, let’s see if we can find the will.” Garnier looked around, never having been in the place before.

It was not huge, but it was certainly big enough, albeit a little grubby from years of benevolent neglect. It wasn’t the cleanliness, so much as the sheer amount of time that had passed, with the faint smell from the pilot lights burning on the gas range, the washing up, the boiling of kettles and bacon frying and pots full of potatoes. Judging by some little vents here and there, it was forced-air heat, most likely from a boiler in the basement. This would be either coal or gas-fired, and then there would be Gilles and his cigars and his pipe. Every little bit of that would contribute, over the years, to that faint yellow tinge to the walls and ceiling.

The place had a certain patina about it.

“Try the study. There will be a desk, and a locked drawer. Gilles has a Beretta around here somewhere as well. Either in the desk or in the bedside table.” Maintenon would have had a keychain, spare keys, all of that sort of thing, and they were the sorts of things that would not necessarily go along on vacation. “Anyone that reads the paper will know the place is vacant.”

And that included thieves—it especially, included thieves, as too many past events had proven. Plundering the homes of the recently-deceased was almost a specialty with some of the real pros.

Hubert went and opened the fridge. It looked like Gilles had cleaned out the milk and stuff, but there were some other things in there that didn’t look or smell very good. Lettuce, tomatoes, the carrots, stuff like that was looking pretty bad. What looked like cold roast beef had definitely gone green. Gilles really ought to have thrown that out.

“Ugh. I’ll see if I can find some garbage bags, or a box or something. But all of this stuff has to go—it’s a little over and above the call of duty…but, even so.”

Garnier went through the archway, looking for a hallway or something, and unsure of the layout.

Well, the will was there, in a sealed envelope, having found a key to the locked drawer on the upper right—the key was at the back, under stacks of old bills, some other boring papers and stuff, going back years. It was in an unlocked drawer, way down on the left side. Just as Hubert had said. As for the Beretta or any other possible weapons, they were beginning to get a little frustrated. It just didn’t seem to be there, and yet Hubert was pretty certain that it would be, or should be, if only they knew just where to look—having gotten a good puff of flour in the face when pulling an open bag out of the cupboard, he was getting a little fed up. They’d already loaded up a couple of bags of wasted food, and put aside a few tins of sardines for LeBref, or more accurately, Sylvestre.

There were only so many places to search. They’d already gone through every pocket of every coat, in every closet sort of thing.

“If a man was going away, there is some reason to make sure of the weapon. When he’s home, there are reasons to keep it relatively close to hand—” Yet they just couldn’t find the thing, one way or another.

“I still think he’s got a safe-deposit box somewhere.”

“Why the gun and not the will, then?” Hubert had a point, one had to admit. “We have the bank book, and we’ll have to call them and ask.”

The actual balance was impressive indeed.

“That’s quite a piss-pot of money, when you sort of see it all at once…”

Figuratively speaking—

“Huh.”

There was a very expensive wrist-watch in a top dresser drawer, still in the original box, and that was just one more example. The cuff-links and tie-clips that he saw were all right, but much more humble in cost and origin. Hubert doubted if the man had ever actually worn it—no more than twice, if that. It was that kind of watch, an engraved presentation from the department, after so many years of service, and a memento, rather than anything Gilles would ever wear. It was solid gold and heavy as hell.

They had gotten to the point of pulling potatoes and onions out of the bins in the small pantry, still looking for the pistol, when there was a bit of noise from the doorway. The door closed behind someone…they stepped out of the pantry.

Alphonse.

Hubert and Garnier stood there, a little surprised to see him, but of course he and Gilles had been fairly close. He’d also been in that fucking car all day long.

“It’s all right.” The tone was gruff, nothing unusual there. “Don’t worry. I have a gendarme, it’s his beat, he’s, uh…he’s keeping an eye on the car.”

“Huh.” Alphonse to the last, thought Hubert.

It struck him that they’d probably miss him when he was gone.

Alphonse pulled a bottle out of a paper sack that he had under the arm.

“I got this up the street. It was Maintenon’s brand.”

Cognac.

“We’ll need some glasses, please. Unless you’re not having one.”

Garnier gave Hubert a look, and he shrugged. Opening a cupboard, Martin found three glasses.

“Sure—why not.”

Opening up the bottle, Alphonse poured three stiff shots.

He set the bottle down on the table and raised a glass.

They took up their own respective glasses…

“Gentlemen. May I propose a toast—”

Hubert choked up a little on that one, but nodded.

“Sure, why the hell not—”

Garnier nodded.

Why not.

“To the ghost of Gilles Maintenon.” Was he fucking serious?

But of course he was.

There was only one thing for it, but to agree, to nod solemnly, to raise the glass, and to drain it.

“To the ghost of Gilles Maintenon.”

And if that didn’t put a rather fine polish on their day, nothing else ever would.

As for Gilles, he would have appreciated it—and who wouldn’t.

 

END

  

Previous.

 

Chapter One, Scene One.

Chapter One, Scene Two.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three. 

Chapter Four. 

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Twelve.

Chapter Thirteen.

Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter Fifteen.

Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter Seventeen.

Chapter Eighteen.

Chapter Nineteen.

Chapter Twenty.

Chapter Twenty-One.

Louis has books and stories available from Google Play.

 

 

Thank you for reading. 

 

 

 

Dead Reckoning, Chapter Twenty-One. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

Their next stop was to Madame d’Coutu’s new place of employment, the result of some simple telephone work, and the lady would be expecting them at some point in the morning. For whatever reason, traffic was sheer hell this morning. It was halfway across town.

Good old Alphonse, sitting bored in the vehicle, had been listening with the radio actually turned up for a change, (rather than having it down real low and simply ignoring it), and had taken the call while they were inside the store. One more hit on their planted news story, and now they had another little errand on their plate. He had it all down in his own notebook, in writing that was surprisingly legible. Knowing Alphonse, he would have taken his sweet time with it.

Things were looking up.

And of course, Yvonne wasn’t too happy to see them. Truth was, they were late, and an appointment was an appointment. Real gentlemen would have been punctual above all else. For her, it was just so much bother, and she wasn’t shy about telling them that, either. She’d had one or two calls from the reporters, and she was still spitting mad about those people as she called them. It was also the height of embarrassment for an honest working woman to be visited by the police. Especially as her lady had been out all morning and had arrived home at exactly the wrong time and naturally, she had questions. One could only sympathize, not that it had done much good. For the working classes, to be out of work for any length of time would very shortly lead to personal disaster and naturally the police understood that. The dress was shapeless, the hair grey-brown and mousy, and there were lines around the eyes and the mouth. One wondered if she had smiled in days.

Hubert doubted if the lady had been out of work more than two or three days, what with having signed on with an employment agency and all. Still, one had to listen for a while out of politeness. Funny thing was, she seemed to have done all right with her current assignment, one wondered if she saw that much herself. Three times the size of Maintenon’s place, bright and airy and well-lit, the paint was the work of professional decorators rather than a mom-and-pop project. Hopefully, her current boss-woman wasn’t a real tyrant.

They were in the kitchen of a fine old flat, in a very fashionable part of the city, with the cook and the maid having made themselves scarce, and the lady of the house sort of fussing and fuming in the sitting room out front.

So far, she hadn’t been of much help, but then it had always been a long shot.

“Anyways. I’ve told you everything I know.” She was adamant, and her eyes strayed to the clock on the wall.

Having lost her previous employment, through no fault of her own and at some inconvenience to herself, she had only reluctantly given up the key to Maintenon’s apartment. The three of them were seated around the kitchen table…

Hubert, known for a certain charm of his own, was doing his best to soothe her down.

“Naturally we understand, Madame, and of course we understand your feelings…”

He patted her forearm and she snatched it away. It was all he could do, just to try again.

“Now, is there any little thing, any funny little detail, anything that might have struck you about those men, ah, that afternoon.”

“No. Not really.” She’d just taken her one-hour lunch break, gotten back to work on the dot of one o’clock, and she had been dusting and sweeping, just thinking about her shopping list, (and killing time strategically, or so he thought), when the knock had come at the door.

There was nothing new in any of this, it was all in the original report. It was time to call it a day with this one. Neither one of them had ever met the lady, and whatever ideas one may have had about the typical housekeeper, Yvonne had turned out to be a harried woman, old-before-her-time and with few skills and perhaps not too many friends. Unmarried, her only emotional outlet would be a cat and perhaps her sister’s children and grandchildren. That and a lot of knitting.

“Hmn. Okay. Would you mind taking a look at this photograph, please. Do you recognize any of the men in this picture.”

“Non.”

“Are you certain? Not even the slightest resemblance?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head.

Hubert picked a random face and brought it in a little closer.

“This man?”

She shook her head.

“Or this one?”

“No.”

“What about this one—” Monsieur Samaha.

Again, she said no.

“…or this one…”

“No.”

“Okay.” Taking a different tack, he mentioned that the cat, Sylvestre, was being well looked-after, and she made a face but said nothing.

The cat was no longer any problem of hers, and that seemed clear enough.

“Also, Madame, we have been wondering, well, if you have been paid, that is to say all caught up in terms of your employment at the Maintenon household…er.”

She flushed, went rigid, and then allowed that she had, in fact, been paid, in full, in advance, up to the end of the month by the inspector. This was before he went down south. Gilles hadn’t even been gone a week, but as soon as she’d heard the news, she had bolted for new employment.

“What would you have had me do?” Although she seemed a little nicer now, and the truth was, she might even owe Gilles a fair chunk of money in purely legalistic terms.

The lady didn’t actually come out and say that part, but it was a fair inference and no big revelation, personality-wise. It might explain her whole demeanour so far, what with having a conscience after all, a little touch of the guilt, and this in what could only be assumed to be a good Catholic. Especially if one got caught—

He nodded sagely, resisting the urge to try patting her on the arm again.

“Okay. Well, thank you, Madame, we will not waste any more of your precious time.” A thought struck him. “Normally, people would get severance pay anyways…and the circumstances are nothing if not unusual, right?”

He could see her consider it, latching on to it perhaps.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, really, but they’d had no option but to try her out.

He snapped the notebook closed, preparing to rise.

“There is one thing, though.”

“Oh? What’s that Madame.”

“It’s about the name on the coveralls. I distinctly remember now—it was Montgolfier Brothers.” She gave a firm nod and that was that—

Right up until the point when you realized she’d been lining the bottom of the birdcage, budgie-birds or parakeets, or something very much like that and quite musical…and that sure looked like a page from Le Temps in there.

It was hard to say if she was being deliberately obtuse, or maybe she was just genuinely stupid—she hadn’t mentioned Gilles by name in the entire time they’d been there, admittedly that really hadn’t been very long at all. It was like she had problems of her own and simply didn’t give a damn—

They clambered to their feet, repressing deep sighs or any expression at all.

Sometimes it was all one could do, but to remain polite, perhaps even gracious.

“Thank you, Madame d’Coutu. We are, of course, very grateful for your time.”

The poor woman had been alone in that kitchen, for at least some time, with a freezer full of dead people. That had to be taken into account as well—of course she had fucking well run for it, and who could blame her. It was perfectly understandable, and no shame in that. Except in the mind of the lady herself. It was a story she would tell and retell, and it would no doubt grow into something quite extraordinary over the years.

He really should have told her all of that, but, the problem was that the words just wouldn’t come out.

***

It was almost like they were getting somewhere.

“Yes, sir, we made the patches here. Montgolfier Brothers. They ordered a dozen patches, and paid cash up front. I’d never heard of them, we’ve never dealt with them, and they had no account. Our policy is clear on that.” Monsieur Renaud was the owner and manager of a very small factory, a sweat-shop, with about a dozen women at sewing machines in a loft on the eastern outskirts of the city. “A Monsieur Bisson. He came in person. A rather ordinary fellow, middle-aged, slight of build, average height and average weight. Well-dressed. A small mustache, hair fairly light but not real blond if you know what I mean…”

He thought further.

“Oh. Little round black glasses. The hair was combed straight up and over. I looked it up, that was about May twenty-first.” The gentleman had worn a hat, but he’d taken it off while coming in the door.

“Ah, I was just going to ask.”

The big, open room was on the top floor and very warm, although every window in the place seemed to be open. A fly buzzed here and there, curious and hungry, or maybe even just friendly, as Hubert brushed one off of the tip of his nose. The thing seemed to be in love with him—

He could feel the sweat all right, running down inside the shirt and he wondered how they did it sometimes.

The office itself was a glassed-in enclosure, where the employees were never out of sight, and neither was the boss. It was a little quieter in there with the door closed, with a fan to at least stir the air a little. Sewing wash-cloths and hemming hand-towels and fucking tea-towels for a centime apiece and things like that…cash paid daily, or so it said on a sign down below at street level.

No wonder the working classes were unhappy.

Without much hope, he pulled out the picture and let the man have a look at it.

“Do you recognize any of these men? Does anyone in particular look familiar? What about this one…or this one…or this one here…?” It was an old and familiar routine.

The gentleman took a moment to study it carefully.

“Ah, no. I’m afraid not.”

And in this particular case, not much joy to be had. It was routine police work, nothing more, nothing very exciting and not all that informative in terms of solving cases.

Perhaps sensing their disappointment, and wishing to be helpful, the gentleman spoke.

“Would you like to see how they are made?”

Apparently, they had an automated embroidering machine, which worked off of punch-card type templates and they could produce team and commercial patches in many fonts and sizes. These ranged from name patches on a mechanic’s work shirt to shoulder patches and breast patches, hat-badges, for police, fire, ambulance, sports teams and commercial enterprises all over the city. They could use any colour of thread, in any combination, and promised two-day completion on the smaller orders. The bigger the order, the steeper the discount. Custom design was a specialty.

Martin Garnier gave him a nod. What the hell, they had nothing to lose but time.

“Sure, why not. We’d be delighted.” Think of it as good public relations, or planting the seeds of tomorrow’s success today.

Not everyone was so willing to talk to the police and that sort of thing ought to be encouraged. It was a small place, the machine was right there, and it really didn’t take all that long. With an assistant, and at least one damned sharp mind, the pair had quickly thrown in a few steel letters in a particular font, changed a couple of spools of thread, cut a patch of flannel, a simple rectangle, clamped all that in place, and set the machine to work. They watched, open-mouthed, and finally, switching off, the fellow reached in with scissors, snipped a few extraneous threads, and pulled out a long, skinny patch, all set to be sewn on to a garment.

Montgolfier Brothers.

Nice.

The gentleman handed it over with a nod and a smile.

“And there you have it…”

“Thank you for the tour.” If nothing else, they had another pretty generic description of another suspect, and a name which would probably turn out to be bullshit. “I have to admit, that was all very interesting.”

They would have an odd little exhibit to show off when they got back to the room.

Martin wasn’t trying to be smart, but to see a little follower-thingy, a vertical rod on the end of an arm, tracing an outline on a row of steel templates on the one side, and the needles going up and down, tukka-tukka-tukka-tukka, around and around on a piece of fabric on the other side, and seeing the letters appear in three colours, as the whole apparatus sort of slid along on tracks above it; on a patch of felt, (or whatever), was fascinating enough in its own way.

At least he thought so—

It was all very illuminating.

END

Previous.

 

Chapter One, Scene One.

Chapter One, Scene Two.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three. 

Chapter Four. 

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

Chapter Nine.

Chapter Ten.

Chapter Eleven.

Chapter Twelve.

Chapter Thirteen.

Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter Fifteen.

Chapter Sixteen.

Chapter Seventeen.

Chapter Eighteen.

Chapter Nineteen.

Chapter Twenty.

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