Another week approached suddenly; it spent an extended chilly night lurking, prepared an ambush in the dark and unsettling hours before sunrise, and finally carried out its assault on the people of Earth with a dreaded Monday morning.
It was dreaded and despised an average amount and was otherwise uneventful, which was ironic, considering that it was ranking up the speed of extraordinary from just a tad weird to complete and utter madness. Later it would bloom into quite the spectacle, but that was later. Now the day was not so much dark, but dark-ish, and irritatingly humid, and filled with loud, obnoxiously busy streets. More or less your normal start of the week.
On that Monday morning, Dirk woke up with a distinct feeling of lack in himself. He hadn’t a clue as to what it is that he was lacking, but it was strong enough to get him out of bed without checking his phone, walk all the way to the kitchen, and drink two pints of tap water out of a soup bowl while barely pausing for breath. This is when it occurred to him that the distinct lack he was feeling was in fact thirst. Based on a first approximation, he deduced that it was caused by him going most of the previous day forgetting to perhaps drink something.
Later Dirk proceeded to put on trousers and the first t-shirt in sight (it turned out to be the Sound of Nothing t-shirt), grab all the things he usually forgot to grab, and go outside to begin his journey towards another breakfast at Todd’s. Immediately upon walking out, he was greeted by a wall of rain. This was an unexpected Monday morning development, since half an hour ago when Dirk woke up the sky was perfectly clear and almost blue in colour.
“Strange,” thought Dirk, then proceeded to think about a different thing he found strange, and within 45 seconds had been lead astray by a chain of associative links into the realm of competitive dog grooming. He thought about many other things, such as hybrid fruits, black holes, snail-fighting knights in medieval books and cinnamon toast, while he searched for a rain-appropriate jacket. When he found one at last and stepped outside again, the rain was gone and the sky was back to almost blue.
“Strange,” thought Dirk a second time, and got into Farah’s car at once, somewhat afraid that if he were to pop back in for a different jacket, the rain would return with a vengeance and drain him out.
He made two side-quests on his way to Todd and Farah’s apartment, one to a pharmacy to buy a very specific brand of toothpaste he was running out of, and one to a bakery to buy something for tea. The girl who worked at the bakery handed him the macaroons in a cardboard box while making a passing comment about electricity behaving weirdly in the entire street.
“Ooh macaroons,” thought Dirk, thanked the seller girl and went back into Farah’s car.
He missed Farah herself by a few minutes upon arriving. She had just left in Kevin’s Aston Martin, on the passenger seat next to Kevin, who was gently holding onto her elbow for protection and moral support. Outwardly, Farah reacted to this by rolling her eyes. Deep down, she found that a bit repulsive but rather endearing, the same way one feels about a cat bringing them a dead mouse as a gift.
Todd greeted Dirk at the threshold with a broad smile.
“Thought you’d be with your professor,” he said, as they walked side by side into the kitchen.
“Roger has a full day of lectures and grading papers,” Dirk explained, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “I am currently in the careful consideration part of my case. It’s here.” He tapped his left temple. “This is where the magic is happening. In my mysterious box of case solutions.”
“Sure.” Todd smirked. “Which tea do you want?” he asked, pointing at the assortment in the cabinet above the stove.
This was a redundant gesture. Todd did not require Dirk’s answer, as he knew exactly which tea he drank, and in which way, and from which mug. That knowledge was one of many in Todd’s catalog of Stuff He Knew About Dirk, alongside with his favorite ice-cream flavour (plain vanilla with rainbow sprinkles), his favorite seats in a cinema (middle of third row from the top), and his preferred bath temperature (as hot as physiologically possible). The last he discovered under curious circumstances which we will not dwell on for now.
“Are you going to tell me then?” Todd asked, once they were both in possession of a hot beverage, watching the steam rise slowly up from the cups. “About your case? You first, then me.”
“Of course I will,” Dirk said, putting three macaroons at once directly into his face. “Who do you think I am, some sort of no-fun secretive case not-teller? Please.” He scoffed. All of this he was saying with his mouth stuffed, but somehow managing to produce coherent sound without spluttering crumbs all over himself, the table, and Todd. “So,” he added another macaroon, gulped down some tea, and seemed at last satisfied. “Here is the scoop.”
He explained the case so far in his usual manner, meandering and zooming in on the most random of details, and got all the way to entering Roger’s summerhouse when Todd interrupted him.
“Wait,” Todd said. “So it really is about a missing music box? I kept waiting for you to throw in some twist but…”
“There is no twist,” Dirk replied. “And also no music box, as I was about to tell you, Todd.”
He got up from the table, too excited to carry on sited.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “we got into professor’s Daly summerhouse, and discovered it in ruins. Utterly devastated. Turned upside down and clearly ravaged by a thorough search of the house, with strongly suspected underlying thief premise.”
“Underlying thief premise?” Todd repeated, half-smiling.
“It is a technical detective term, Todd.” Dirk nodded, solemnly serious. “I insisted on calling the police on the off-chance that they would be of use - last time I am making that mistake - and we examined the place ourselves while waiting for the officers to arrive.
And I discovered,” he got back to the table for a moment to finish his tea, “I discovered that there was no pattern to the chaos except for one.”
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“What was it?”
“Every battery-equipped device in the house had been relieved of the batteries,” Dirk explained. “But!” And he pointed a dramatic finger at the ceiling, which made Todd look up involuntarily for a second. “The batteries were immediately discarded on the floor.”
He took a pause to let the information sink in.
“And based on this one pattern in the midst of disarray,” Dirk proclaimed, “I made the conclusion that it is relevant to the case, based on a detecting technique pioneered by the great detective Poirot.”
“Did she really invent a detecting technique?” Todd asked.
“Who?”
“Agatha Christie?”
“What does Agatha Christie has to do with all this?”
“She wrote the books about Poirot?”
“Books?”
“Yeah? And then they made a TV show based on that?”
“It was a TV show?” Dirk sadness was one of a child who had just been told that Santa Clause was in fact another invention of their parents, alongside with the Easter Bunny and paid internships. “Ah nuts.” He pouted. “I thought it was a documentary!
And I only discovered it a month ago, actually. Before that I thought Poirot was a type of a Belgian bun.”
“Anyway.” Todd decided to move the conversation along artificially. “Did the police help?”
“Kind of the opposite to be honest.” Dirk shook his head. “As in they made the floor dirty and took a few photos and said they would call if they found anything. I don’t think they will, unless Sherlock and Tina have police friends in Seattle. Roger wasn’t a fan of them either,” he added. “Actually he said, and I’m quoting roughly, ‘it is a surprise they didn’t shoot me in the back for robbing my own house’.”
“But was anything actually stolen?” Todd asked.
“A lot of books, for some reason,” Dirk replied. “And some food items. Two whole cartons of shelf-stable chocolate milk. Mm. Pity about the milk…” he muttered. “So what about yours?”
It was Todd’s turn to summarize his case. Well, in his case, there wasn’t a lot to summarize, apart from yesterday’s phone call.
“Two mysterious break ins with weirdly specific stealing,” Todd pointed out. “Could be…”
“…connected!” Dirk beamed. “Indeed. I will consider this.”
“Also Kevin’s being watched feeling tends to come and go a lot,” Todd added. “Was completely fine yesterday, and then wham, today he’s all jittery again. More jittery than usual anyway. Started freaking out at 10am exactly. Then Farah took him for a walk to his tower.”
“Pardon?”
“Accompanied him to a meeting,” Todd explained. “To his company building. They will be back for dinner. Which he will probably cook. Ugh,” Todd frowned. “The dishes will be on me this time.”
“Have you noticed the very brief rain at around that time?” Dirk asked.
“No…” Todd replied. “There was a rain?”
“Yes, I had a similar reaction,” Dirk said, stuffing his mouth with broken macaroon pieces thoughtfully. “Interesting. Really interesting.”
*
Out of all the mysterious things that were beginning to pile up on that Monday, Kevin’s inconsistent feeling of being watched had the simplest explanation: Orson.
Orson took a day off on Sunday to accompany his elderly mother to the church. He considered this an essential, non-negotiable day off, so he didn’t even think of notifying his bosses.
He resumed his responsibilities on Monday, and even arrived early to compensate for the Sunday absence. At 6:15 AM sharp he arrived on Washington street and kicked off his investigation by circling every building in sight seven times over. This was crucial for two reasons: creating a map of the area in his brain, and getting some much needed gentle exercise. Orson was very responsible when it came to exercise.
Once the map had settled in his brain, he began to wander from building to building, pretending to be various deeply uninteresting and desperately lost persons, and thus engaging local residents in unassuming chit-chat. Through this method, he triangulated to a specific building in under two hours.
Triangulating to a specific floor took much longer than he anticipated. He waited patiently downstairs for someone to pass him by, pretending to be a confused mailman, but no one wanted to talk to him or indeed even look in his direction for some reason. He eventually had to succumb to knocking on doors, and was soon pulled in almost by force into an extensive coffee chat with a remarkably talkative woman.
The woman turned out to be a newly divorced 55-year old teacher with a passion for bird watching and a seemingly endless supply of cucumber and cress sandwiches. Orson wasn’t sure what exactly was on the woman’s agenda. One part of him thought she was just lonely and in need of a conversation. The other, going off of the woman’s looks and strange preoccupation with the colour of his eyes (in the span of an hour, she compared them to cinnamon powder, tropical earth after rain, and sparkling agate), he suspected another reason.
He escaped the woman at last with a napkin that had her name and phone number scribbled on it. He began the motion to throw the napkin out, then paused. Perhaps Carol was fifteen years older than him and also a complete stranger, but she had very lovely eyes too.
Regardless, the very long conversation got him to a specific floor in a specific building, at which point Orson had decided that he’d made enough noise for the day, and that it was time to leave and lay low for 24 to 48 hours. He bumped into some weird man in a bright yellow jacket on his way out and retreated to a Dunkin Donuts.
He was in the process of cutting his cream-filled lunch with a plastic knife and fork when his phone rang for the first time that day. He then proceeded to ignore it for the first time, being of firm belief that phones had no place on a dinner table (or a Dunkin Donuts plastic bench). He ignored it the second time while on the bus to his home, and for the third time while taking clothes out of the washing machine where he forgot them the day before.
When he picked up the phone at last, the two persons on the other end were very, very angry.
“Orson?” the distorted voice shouted as soon as the call was answered. “We are very, very angry.”
Orson swallowed a knot of anxiety in his throat and removed the phone from his ear by just a tiny bit.
He had two bosses, who refused to disclose their names and were therefore referred to exclusively as Boss 1 and Boss 2. Both spoke through voice distortion devices that made them sound like evil robots on helium gas.
The bosses were also exceedingly strange, which, considering that they hired Orson from a LinkedIn profile that had no information apart from his CV and a photo of Deadpool, was not that surprising.
“I am sorry I did not pick up the phone,” Orson mumbled. “I try to maintain a very strict work-life balance.”
“You are a mercenary, you idiotic human monkey,” Boss number one spat out. “You’re not supposed to have a work-life balance!”
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
There was a prolonged awkward pause.
“Well?” Boss 1 demanded. “What are you waiting for? Report on the state of your mission!”
“Reporting,” Orson replied. “I was unable to get close enough to the target at the previous location. Then the target moved locations, actually, and today I was able to track to a specific floor in a specific building. I expect to will have fulfilled the mission by the end of the week.”
“Unacceptable!” Boss 1 bellowed. “We do not have a week!”
There was some shouting and crackling, and eventually the phone seemed to have been passed on to Boss 2.
“Listen here you little hairless rat,” Boss 2 said calmly. “I know we are your bosses, but we have our own boss, and that boss is not very lenient on missed deadlines. One of the deadlines is approaching faster than we’d anticipated, and when it’ll hit, Orson, when it’ll hit, we will be in big big trouble. And you know what will happen then?”
“I will be in big trouble too?”
“That’s right Orson, very clever!” Boss 2 exclaimed, with the excitement of a dog trainer who had finally managed to get a “sit” command out of a particularly difficult specimen. “You have potential. Now finish your mission in three days tops or you won’t have any. Bye.”
And Boss 2 hung up the phone.
“Well that was… unexpected,” Orson said to no one in particular, and, deciding that he won’t be able to do anything about it till tomorrow anyway, returned to dealing with his laundry.