The Philosophical Strangler(52)

Heh. I’ll admit I laughed, thinking about it. Gwendolyn had been a tough cookie even when she was a kid. I could just imagine what she was like now!

After a day or so, I bucked myself up. Life is what it is, and that’s all there is to it. What else do you ever get?

Philosophy, my ass. Greyboar could call it entropy till he turned blue in the face, and practice his Languor, and pretend he was discerning the secrets of the eightfold whatchamacallit in the profound depths of the foursome whosit. Me, I stuck with the wise man’s most profound saying: “Shit happens.”

And, I reminded myself firmly, it was great for the trade! Business was absolutely booming, and nobody had to worry about the porkers anymore. Not stranglers and their customers, at any rate. Oh my, no. The porkers were running their tails off stamping out riot and revolution, ferreting out subversion, grappling the serpent of anarchy, etc., etc. Likewise, the army. Likewise, the Inquisition.

Greyboar, of course, refused to look at it rationally. He called it fin de siècle something or other—angst, I think. Me, I knew it was just that everybody—especially in the upper crust where most of our customers came from—was swept up in the sagacity of the wise man.

Shit was happening, indeed. At which time, as the wise man says: “Better to be the shitter than the shittee.”

We were swamped with prospective clients. Greyboar’s reputation was now sky-high. Nobody was in his league anymore. Nobody ever was, actually; but now even the cloddies knew it. Greyboar had always been famous in the scholarly journals, mind you. The Journal of Contemporary Assassination, Asphyxiation Quarterly, Garrote Gazette—one or the other always had a reference to him in a current article. And, year after year, like clockwork, Jane’s The World’s Perps listed him as, and I quote: “the state of the art in the trade” and “the standard by which professional thuggee must be measured.”

But now there was a flurry of articles about him in the popular press, too. Most of which—brace yourself—were titled something like “World’s Greatest Strangler A Recluse!” and “Greyboar Spurns Another Offer!”

I swear, it broke my heart. More business than you could shake a stick at—more potential business, I should say—and Greyboar turned down 99% of it.

He was—keep a straight face—“bored.” He was—don’t laugh—“not challenged.” He wanted—are you ready for this?—“only jobs which are epistemologically valid, ontologically rigorous, and adhere to ethical entropic axioms.”

I’m serious. The guy made a living crushing windpipes—this is not, as a rule, considered intellectually demanding labor—and he insisted on philosophically correct chokes.

Of course, I protested. I denounced. I sermonized on sloth. I whined. I groused.

None of which did the slightest bit of good. Then, seeing starvation looming, I scrounged up what jobs I could which satisfied the great philosophe’s dignity.

Weird, weird jobs. For instance: The Royal Astronomical Society hired us to strangle a vampire who was bumping off its members in an observatory. I kid you not. Actually, as it turned out, the whole thing was really on account of the fact that the telescope in the observatory in question was—

Never mind. Some other time. I just bring it up now to illustrate the woeful life of a strangler’s agent.

Then, naturally, it got worse, because I made the mistake of complaining to Jenny and Angela about it.

“Pooh,” sniffed Jenny. “Sniff,” poohed Angela.

The next thing I knew, the two of them were hauling me down to Benvenuti’s studio, insisting that I get my own portrait painted alongside their own. “In order to improve my spirits,” they said.

I protested at the cost, but that turned out to be a bad move because Benvenuti was making a ton off of his portraits of Jenny and Angela. Which astonished me, since they weren’t nudes. Turned out there was a market for great portraits of youthful innocence, if you can believe it. What a weird world. Oh, sure, he gave them several free of charge, which would have been worth a bundle—except Jenny and Angela refused to let me sell them. Which, I’ll admit, is not something I pushed very hard. After a while, I got to like having the portraits around.

Then—then!—Benvenuti offered to do a portrait of me. And—brace yourself for some vulgarity here—free of charge. Artists, I decided, had the most disgraceful set of professional ethics I’d ever heard of. A scandal, what it was.

Well, I could hardly refuse under the circumstances. Especially after Jenny and Angela threatened to, ah, “withhold their affections.” So there I sat in a studio, day after day, sulking on a stool next to a table loaded with silly fruit. What made it all the worse was that Benny got really into the project.