My glasses are the first to feel the effects of whatever they’re smoking down in Oscar Charron’s gambling hole. Suddenly taken by the humidity, they fog up with haste and I’m forced to pluck them from my face before my eyes have even begun to adjust to the murky scene before me.
Circular tables under dim lamps are scattered amongst the cavern, all of them no more covered with cards and dice than they are with beers, drugs and money.
Men throw down, testing their luck, with excessive riches for the winnings. I become quickly aware of the way their husky voices—oftentimes broken with sporadic shouts—and smacking drink glasses perform a cacophony that comes off more percussive than melodic, like vocal drumming.
Walking between the gambling tables, I keep my notebook clutched close to my hip, my pen drumming against it keenly.
My nose is the second to notice anything distinctly offensive, as it rapidly recoils in the face of the sharpest, most pungent odour it’s met in recent memory.
Christ. What are they doing down here?
I slot myself onto one of the tables between a handful of drinks and more than enough coins. The fella to my left blows out a cannon fire of cigarette smoke, which I wave away.
“Any you boys seen Oscar Charron round here?” I ask.
One across the table gives me a look. “He’s out back.” Next to him, there’s a sorry-looking fella with, call it what it is, a face of grossly-deformed nature. They’ve got him running the game, like a circus attraction cut loose.
“Out back. Where’s that?”
First fella points with his chin, and puts down a card. A couple of the other guys glance up at me as I drift from their game, and put my glasses back on.
It sure isn’t pretty but it’s better here than back in Bellvoir, is all I’m thinking, walking through their den and catching constant cigarette smoke in the face. There’s no plague yet in Montfort, though I suspect it isn’t long for it.
I find a door towards the back of the den and shove it open into a small room stacked with beds, like some military dorm. I realise now, this is half of what I’ve been smelling all this time—a significant portion of the other half’s just my brain filling in the gory details of wartime.
“You Oscar Charron?” I say.
I know it’s him by the fact my assistant sent me off here with renderings of the man, and also he looks as the man who runs this town ought to, grimy and undercooked.
Charron puts down his paperback book, yet doesn’t move, simply looks up from where he’s sitting on one of the mattresses, a cigarette bobbing up and down in his mouth. The rest of the room’s inhabitants are an odd bunch, midgets and mutants the lot of them, sick in their deformities.
“And who the hell do you think you are?” Charron says. His chest sweat sparkles diamond-like under the blue light permeating the room. I spot a similar effect bouncing off the foul liquids which wet some of the mattresses.
“I’m the editor-in-chief of a newspaper in Bellvoir,” I respond, walking further into the room.
Charron stands, plucking the cigarette from his mouth and throwing it on the ground. “From all the way up the river? Now that’s some dedication, for a news editor.”
I walk over to a bulbous, slug-like man curled up by the wall with a dog’s bowl beside him.
“You have these poor little shits working for you, Charron?”
“I’m not here calling them little shits to their face, now.”
“Whatever.” I take further examination of the room, shifting my sight from crevice to barrel and grate. “What are you hauling through these cellars? Opioids? Diamonds? They say it’s some amount of wealth that’s passing through Montfort these days, but where’s it coming from?”
Charron laughs and sits at the only table, pouring himself a drink. “It’s not that kind of business, what was your name?”
“Christophe Archambault.” I let the slug-man return to eating his spoiled tray of dog food and join Charron at his table. He pours me a glass, then throws back his own.
“So then, Christophe, you’ve come all this way—probably had to pay for a boat’s crew—and for what, to blackmail me?”
I shake my head.
“Oh don’t bother putting on a show, you utter potato, there’s enough of those in Montfort already!” Charron spits.
“Are you always this welcoming or have I happened to find you on a particularly good day?”
“Listen here, if you’re not out of Montfort next hour, they’ll be needing to hire a new editor-in-chief.”
“Fine. Well done, you read me. I am, frank to say, surprised at what I’ve discovered down here. Tell me, what are you doing with all these… oddities, exactly? Farming them?”
Charron leans back in his chair. “Something of the sort,” he says. “The people respond positively to the eccentric in such times, and these are but eccentric and perverse, not to mention cost-effective when it comes to work.”
Truly, Charron had been right in my original intentions to sail to Montfort. As alarmed as I am in his rapid (and correct) assessment of me I find, mostly, that I am simply ever the more curious in what business I’ve stumbled upon.
“You know,” Charron says, “my father was motivated by material wealth, and dealing with such. But me, and maybe it’s just my wanting to distinguish myself from his antics of old, but I find myself drawn to people.” He shrugs and begins smoking a newly-lit cigarette. “People are better fun.”
I see my life suddenly away from Bellvoir, in place of Charron, running a town full of the ridiculous and spectacular, of harlots and whores.
“Well then,” says Charron, with a smile, and leaning forward now into a sharp spotlight. “There’s an election coming, isn’t there? Don’t you have editorial to get back to?”
“We could’ve been business partners, once.”
“Don’t over-fancy yourself so,” he says with an almost-smile, before leaning backwards once more. “Now go.”
I hear a simmer of laughter crackle faraway in the room, and it’s only when I stand up to leave that I notice it’s from the slug-man, his humoured smile visible in the waning light.
