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who would choose such a powerful symbol for the means to murder.”
And as Frazer finished this declamation, he ap- proached Moore and pressed close against him, veritably nose-to-nose, and with his arms thrown back as if invisibly manacled he generated a horrific grimace and shouted in a most piercing manner, his eyes bulging and his cheeks puffed, his tongue stick- ing out and downwards like a red snake emerging from a black hole.
This bizarre behavior, following so close upon Sir James accusation, seemed to push Moore over some invisible precipice unseen by any in the room. He seized Frazer by the throat and threw him across the long table, his thumbs pressing against his windpipe. And as Frazer’s face began to turn scarlet under the increasing pressure, Moore screamed, “Rodgers died for what he did. It’s all he had to take away, so I did it, for my mates. And you defend him? I’ll kill you as well.”
But before the Lieutenant’s battle-hardened hands could collapse Frazer’s throat, Sergeant Hariaksh jumped onto the table and kicked Moore squarely in the face, sending him sprawling backwards
into the arms of Graves. The captain adroitly spun Moore around and smashed him in the nose with a swift right jab, breaking it with a loud splitting crack that sent the Lieutenant reeling unconscious to the floor.
~
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
From “The Hollow Men” by T.S. Eliot
A short while later, the men found themselves in Horwitz’s office, absent Lieutenant Moore, whom the chief inspector had dragged unconscious to one of his holding cells and locked in. Graves handed Frazer a short whiskey, which Horwitz had offered up from some unseen cabinet beneath his desk and said, “Amazing manner of deduction, Sir James, find- ing so many parallel facts from Moore’s Regimental ensignia.”
“But it was the remoteness of the mistletoe that pointed away from our resolute Rajput warrior here,” Eliot added, grasping the smiling Sergeant Hariaksh by the shoulder.
Frazer looked up from his whiskey and said hoarsely, “That may be so, but it was all a gambit. I had no confidence that the mistletoe branch used to beat
Colonel Rodgers was retrieved in such a fashion. It might have fallen from a wayward storm last night or last week.”
“What!” Horwitz cried. “You mean your deductions were all a charade?”
“I think of it more as a ruse de guerre,” Frazer re- plied, rubbing his throat and looking out the window. “A slight prevarication meant to throw Lieutenant Moore off-balance that’s all. He realized I was on to his Regiment’s rustic antecedents as a means to murder but I had no definitive proof. It was then that I remembered something you said, Inspector.”
“Me? And what did I say that was of significance to your theatrics?”
“That you could read guilt in a person’s face or his composure,” Frazer replied. “And it reminded me of something I’d once read in a Navy Journal; a fellow who’d been around the world with Captain Cook.
He described a Shaman in Samoa using no more
than that grimace to strike an enemy dead, possibly through sympathetic psychic impressions. The victim really believed the Shaman had the power to kill him, so he quite mysteriously responded by dying.”
Graves burst into laughter and cried, “You primed the pump with your supposition about the mistle- toe and then bluffed the bastard into violence with a mask of aggression. How rich! We could use you on the Maginot Line, Sir James. Scare the bloody Bosch to pieces.”
Belton’s short stories have appeared The Woven Tale Press, The Font, Nonbinary Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Fterota Logia, Mys- tery Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Constellations, South Shore Review, The Satirist, Adelaide, Meet Me at 19th Street, Cicada and Art News. His professional memoir, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. His short story “Seneca Village Arises,” (Meet Me @ 19th Street Journal) was awarded “Best First Chapter” in the journal’s 2021 contest for a Young Adult novel opening dealing with racial inequality. In addition, his short story “Murder at the Trocadero” won the Writers Digest popular fiction award for Mystery/Crime writing in 2017.
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