The Jules Verne Steam Balloon by Guy Davenport

Author:Guy Davenport
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781504019644
Publisher: Open Road Media

Les Exploits de Nat Pinkerton de Jour en Jour: Un Texte de René Magritte Translated and Improved

Nat Pinkerton, the private detective, has arrived by horsecar, foot, and elevator at his office in New York. As soon as he has handed his bowler, gloves, and cane to the buttons, his lieutenant introduces a client.

—My case, the client, who is a lady of the upper middle class, explains without preamble, is one the likes of which you have never heard. My husband plays the bassoon in the Nineteenth Precinct Fireman’s Marching Band. Our cook is Irish. I have a weakness for the finer things.

Nat Pinkerton lights a cheroot, listens attentively, makes a note with a pencil from time to time.

—I see it all, he says.

—The potato stew, she says, was strewn, you understand, from the living-room linoleum to the fire escape.

—You had no premonition? You suspected nothing?

—The tureen shattered in countless pieces right before my eyes.

She leaves. The detective gives orders to his lieutenant. The lieutenant, disguised as a Wall Street broker, leaves with a shotgun and bloodhound.

The detective writes a letter. He affixes a pink postage stamp depicting General George Washington, value three centimes. He uses a pseudonym in his return address.

He admires his office. A portrait of Mozart hangs above the steam radiator. On a table covered with a turkey carpet there is an Edison phonograph, an electric fan, a porcelain bust mapped phrenologically, a stereopticon viewer, a revolver, a lantern, an Argand astral lamp.

Towards noon, his morning’s work being over, he strolls down Broadway to a well-appointed restaurant. He has an andouillette, some salad, and a half bottle of sauterne. He takes his coffee on the terrace, where he makes notes in a small book.

After his meal, he takes his customary walk. From habit he makes a mental photograph of all the people he passes. Everybody, he knows, is a potential criminal. The avenues are an endless spectacle. Indians from the Plains, trappers from Canada, English tourists easily spotted by their monocles and rolled umbrellas, senators from the capital who have Negro servants carrying their law books and writs, actresses of unsurpassed beauty lolling in carriages, John Jacob Astor looking out the window of his mansion.

He notices that his client of the morning is sitting in Central Park.

He penetrates the disguise of a well-known anarchist who is trying to pass for a nursemaid wheeling a pram. He steps deftly across the street, blowing his police whistle while felling the anarchist with one stroke of his powerful arm.

—Desist, Sir, cries a policeman arriving on the scene. You cannot strike a respectable nursemaid on the avenues of New York!

—Fool! says Nat Pinkerton. Do you not see that this is Osip Przwynsczki, the notorious anarchist from Paris, France?

Lifting the baby from its pram, he strips it to show that in effect it is a bundle of dynamite sticks bound with a fuse.

Soon after he goes into a bookstore to select a volume for his afternoon’s reading. He chooses Captain Wilkes’s Voyages.

Twice on the way back to his office he is shot at by dastardly outlaws whose careers he has thwarted.

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