Page 48 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

Murderous Wood (continued from preceding page) “How butchered?”
“That’s the part I thought you might help with, Jamie. Graves’ description sounds ritualistic. Fellow was found stripped and a hole where his navel ought to have been. But the quizzical part is the location of the poor fellow’s intestines.”
“His intestines were missing?”
“Well not missing, exactly. Graves says they were wound about a prodigious oak tree like a ribbon for a maypole. Now what do you make of that?” Eliot asked, passing the note across to Frazer.
“I think we need to go out and meet this Captain Graves,” stepping to the door where he put on his coat and grabbed his briar walking stick.
~
The Legion is the Legion while Rome stands, And these same men before the autumn’s fall Shall bang old Vercingetorix out of Gaul.
From “An Old Twenty-Third Man” by Robert Graves
Robert Graves had a boxer’s broken nose, an unruly thatch of brown hair, and a physique both broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips. In his khaki uniform and high black-leather boots he presented that apparent vitality so well thought of in the English Public Schools. Frazer’s first impression of Graves, as he entered the Chief Inspector’s office at Police Head- quarters was of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, indignant at his confinement.
“Eliot!” he shouted as the two entered the Chief In- spector’s Office, sending the khaki-clad soldier across the room to grab the Poet’s hand, which he vigorously pulled up and down like a pump handle. “I’m awfully glad to see you, but it did take the devil of a long time for you to get here, didn’t it?”
“Sorry Robert. I’m glad to help,” Eliot said extricating his hand from the soldier’s battle-hardened grip. “I was delayed but this is Sir James George Frazer,” he added nodding at his companion, “Who has agreed to join me on this unfortunate outing.”
“Sir James,” Graves bellowed grabbing Frazer’s hand, from which he proceeded to pump out another buck- etful of enthusiasm. “I’ve read your books, Sir. Amaz- ing insights, capital cultural analyses. I read for the Classics myself at University, which is before I took up soldiering.”
“I didn’t know that Captain Graves would call down 41
such an eminent citizen to vouch for his character,” Frazer heard from behind as another gentleman came into the room.
“This is Chief Inspector Horwitz,” Graves said by way of introduction, “whose uninvited guest I’ve become.”
Frazer took note of the Inspector as he shook his hand. After the effusive emotional outpouring of Graves, Horwich was demonstratively glacial in demeanor. He wore grey woolen slacks cuffed over scuffed brown shoes, a herring-bone tweed jacket over white starched shirt and a tan bow tie. He sported a waxed handle-bar mustache that hid small lips surrounded by prominent cheeks above a lantern jaw. But it was the Inspector’s gaze that intrigued Frazer; sunken within prominent ridges that sprout- ed thick black brows above hazel eyes that seemed
to darken and swirl in the electric light. Frazer felt something familiar in the way Horwitz quietly scruti- nized the three of them, perhaps a mirrored image of his own gaze, both the dauntless anthropologist and the criminologist surveying primitive cultures, while in the Inspector’s case the tribe he studied would be the unwashed criminal classes.
“Not so notable as some might think,” Frazer replied. “I’m just a curious Professor with a passing interest in the workings of society, and the criminal mind is one facet that I’ve not yet explored. Eliot is the one who has come to vouch for Captain Graves.”
“Ah, Mr. Eliot, an American if I am not mistaken,” Hor- witz said taking his offered hand, “but your accent fails me.”
“Missouri, a dull little State on the banks of the muddy Ohio River,” he replied, “where speech tends to be as flat as the Great Plains, which extends for thousands of miles from St. Louis. The time I spent at the Sorbonne and Oxford seems to have done little to erase the flat insipid intonations of my lingual upbringing.”
Laughing, Frazer grabbed his friend by the arm. “You do yourself an injustice, Thomas. Of course, your external nasal twang may be as unpolished as your colonial antecedents allow but it is your inner voice, that celestial phrasing that metes out superb cadenc- es with unparalleled visions, it is that voice, which men listen to in your poems.”
“Ah, so you are the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot,” Horwitz said.
“You know my work,” Eliot replied with a surprised