AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 63/64
For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the last chapter, Schumacher hands the case over. Now, the blockbuster Plenty Capable Code,.
The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 63/64

Before we found them leaping up from the table, simultaneously rattling and chipping the china, crashing over their chairs, hauling the missing professor onto their shoulders and running out to catch the coach to Cardiff without even paying the bill, we had located Professor Erm, two inquisitive youths, Short Mat Bowls, and chronicler Plenty Capable drinking tea in Beer. Plenty Capable had reclaimed possession of the missing notes the youngsters had stolen back in ‘Wales’ in their search for the missing professor. Having been dragged across the country through the fog and the fine mist, over the Allan Fjord tidal bridge into England, up and down lanes wide and narrow into Beer‚ their shopping trolley had given out and by now was reduced to a lone wobbly wheel, the rest of it having disintegrated somewhere around Mary St. Ottery. This artifact the young man fiddled with idly, spinning it round and round on the tabletop like an improvised draydel. In a vain attempt to save their beloved cart, the youths had early on jettisoned some of the heavier stuff, like Remembrance of Things Past, and A Fuller Account of the role of Amanuenses’ and Scribes in British University Examination Settings, but they’d kept a diary. Unfortunately, this too had suffered – a few pages had blown away and the rest were vapor-damaged.

Undaunted, though royally pissed off, Plenty Capable opened the remaining pages and proceeded to decode them: ‘mix evenly, slowly adding three cups of milk and a spoonful of sugar…’

This she decrypted as an ‘oblique reference’ to ‘the events of one foggy spring night in a suspected jazz bar on the edge of Caerdyff’ :

That should have put Short Mat Bowls onto the game right away, since Caerdyff had never had an edge in that quarter. It had one now, though, and it was a butte! The bar had only recently changed its name from Tinpancake Alley to Cliffnoteshouse.* But that’s neither here nor there, anymore.

Short Mat Bowls slowly subtley slubbed himself into this ill-reputed ‘joint’, and, yes, it was smoke-filled alright, but curiously low on patrons. There were three of them huddled at a corner table in the middle of the room, and none looked like jazz enthusiasts to the hawk-fisted jazz detective. He wasn’t there to detect enthuisiasm though -- he was there to investigate reports of cold hard jazz. But what he immediately detected was an unsound dearth of any music at all. It was as silent as the grave,

‘darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb’
(Dylan, 1970)

-- a burning tomb, even: one of three habitues, a martini-shaker of a man in a sartorially splendid if slightly sanguinary suit had a whiff of the charnal house about him; the second, a grey-haired lady, was filling the room with reeking tobacco fumes. Bowls watched her out of the upper lefthand corner of his good right eye as she shook another five coffin nails out of a packet, laid them on the smouldering ashtray and coaxed them into flames. The third presence was the viciously rumored Wong, Ping kin and ruglord.

The hardened gumshoe’s instincts were to make tracks, but hell, he was thirsty. He wended his way up to the bar, politely pretending it was crowded, and ordered himself a pint‚ of Whatknot. Either there was no bartender or the perfectly reasonable request was overlooked in the crushing void, because nothing happened. Well, Bowls knew his way around places like these: the glasses were kept behind the bar where they couldn’t be seen. It fooled a lot of people, but when these dives were the backdrop of your workaday world…well…you knew where to look.

Short Mat just strolled all ho-hum-just-searching-the-place-for-clues back on around behind the bar, coming up eyeball to eyeball with the missing bartender, a real looker, too, with a magnifying glass about twice as big as his.

‘What you think you’re doing back here, matey?’ she hissed.

‘ Getting me a pint‚ of Whatknot.’

‘Ain’t got pint. We only got 0.568 litre, and that’s with Pat Pending.’

Bowls could clearly see he was being set up for a bad joke, but he could manage that alright. What he didn’t like was her eyeballing him through the lens of a Sherlock Holmes Special. His little ScienceKit K-5 was ok for houseflies but it wasn’t impressing her much. Even worse, that mole he has on the side of his nose? It must have looked like King Kong. She didn’t flinch. The hammer-headed twin-fisted beefcake of a private eye knew he was in trouble. Nothing scared him more than women who didn’t fear tiny mammals. It was unnatural, to his mind. Females like that -- well, when you’d been in this game as long as he had, you knew you never know what they’ll do. You learn, see? So Short Mat Bowls wasn’t about to let on that he could only focus on the hairs on her septum while she was taking in his entire physiognomy.

‘Put it down, sister,’ he growled. ‘Nice and easy.’

‘That’s the least beautiful specimen of the Talpidae clan I’ve ever seen,’ she obliged in a kind tone of voice.

The mole was becoming agitated. Bowls’ fingers were cramping. He shifted his aim imperceptibly to the left upper lip. And then he saw it. The beauty mark – exactly and precisely in the same place as his own. Same size, same shape. Coincidence? He didn’t believe in coincidence. And then he realised – it couldn’t be – but it had to be. This bartender was enough like him to be his twin. But he didn’t have a twin…

He slowly, cautiously, lowered his ScienceKit K-5 and looked straight into his own eyes but several magnitudes larger. What the hell was this funhouse mirror doing here?

‘hsst!’

Short Mat spun around, not moving a muscle. Jesus! What kind of a place was this? Warped mirrors, revolving floors?

‘hsst!’

Snakes! Everywhere! Well, right there anyway. One. It was enough to distract him from the insistent obnoxious hissing of the bartender -- female, as her voice had suggested, and still unmoved by moles. She stood half inside the doorway leading to the back storeroom. The bottom half of her was lost to sight below the threshhold and the top half of her was holding two quarter-quart glasses of cold frothy generic. She laid them to one side on the floorboards.

‘On the house,’ she explained as she climbed out of the pit or depression she’d been in. ‘And if you want anymore, you’ll have to get it yourself.’ She ripped off her tee-shirt once emblazoned with Tinpancake Alley, now CliffNotesHouse*.

‘I quit!’

She hurled the habiliment down, kicked it aside like an old dud and stalked out, her pet snake slithering after her. Never saw her before and never saw her again. Coincidence? Maybe. Short Mat Bowls didn’t have time to think about it much though, because as he sat slumped on the ground with his back up against the wall slurping his quarter-quarts he became aware again of the threesome that constituted the local custom.

They spoke in low guarded voices as if they thought someone might overhear them, although who they thought such a someone would be in a deserted bar, Bowls could not fathom. It was suspicious is what it was! When you’d been in this business as long as he had, well…one thing he knew for sure, muttering in small conspiratorial whispers when there’s no one about to hear was not the activity of honest folk. Straining his finely-tuned professional-strength ear trumpet, Bowls managed to make out a word here and there above the lowering ambient cloud cover:

‘…of it.’ muttered the grey-haired smoke provisioner.

‘…my….over in…’ interjected Wong’s silken voice.

‘…then we’ll…[…]…’ snarled the other man. ‘….and….!’

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make a few preliminary conclusions: somebody was smuggling Welsh soil into Luxemborg.

But why?

At this point in Plenty Capable’s reading of her notes of that fateful night, she stopped abruptly.

* In Welsh, the Dewdrop Inn