The Jungle

The Jungle

Birmingham, England
Four months ago
William Cantor had sneezed into the microphone
before he knew he was about to. The need hit him that
hard, and he didn’t have the chance to turn his head away. The phlegm the sneeze had discharged into his nasal passages had to be snorted back, and that amplified sniff echoed through the nearly deserted meeting room.

“Sorry,” he said miserably and coughed, covering his mouth and turning away so as to show the ten-odd people here for his lecture that he wasn’t a complete philistine. “As an American I knew at Christ Church College said”—that’s right, you rubes, I went to Oxford—“I can shake a hand, I can shake a leg, but I sure can’t shake this cold.”

The response from the crowd might have been polite laughter
or, most likely, a muted cough.

God, how he hated these lectures, the ones in annex buildings or village libraries, where the only attendees were pensioners with no interest in the subject but nothing better to do with their afternoons. Worse than those, actually, were the ones in cities such as Birmingham, so blighted that the sun never seemed to shine, and the people in the room were just here to get warmed up before heading out to panhandle or line up at soup kitchens. He had counted ten attendees before taking the lectern and no fewer than fourteen overcoats. He imagined a string of rusted shopping carts, overladened with detritus, in the library car park.

“ ‘I have not told half of what I saw.’ ” A much better opening line than spraying the microphone with bogies, Cantor thought ruefully. Still, he had goals, and one never knew, maybe the bundled up woman toward the back of the fluorescent-lit room was secretly J. K. Rowling in mufti. “These were the last words uttered by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo upon his deathbed.

“We know from his legendary book, The Travels of Marco
Polo, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa while both languished in a Genoese prison, that Polo, along with his father, Niccolò, and uncle, Maffeo”— the names tripped off Cantor’s tongue despite his head cold, this being far from the first time he had given this particular talk—“that he made many incredible discoveries and beheld many amazing sights.”

There was a disturbance at the back of the room as a newcomer
entered from the library’s brutalist-style reading room. Metal folding chairs creaked as a few people turned to see who had come to hear the speech, probably assuming it was a homeless buddy coming in from Chamberlain Square.

The man wore a cashmere overcoat that nearly swept the floor
over a dark suit, dark shirt, and a matching dark tie. Tall and big, he gave an apologetic wave and took a seat in back before Cantor could see his features. This looked promising, the cash-strapped scholar thought. At least this bloke was wearing clothes that hadn’t already been discarded a few times.

Copyright © 2011 by Sandecker, RLLLP