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Panting and spluttering, Dirk sat down once more, his hands cupped round his nose. After a few long seconds he began to prod it tenderly again and then let the girl examine it.
She said, "My name's Sally Mills, by the way. I usually try to introduce myself properly before physical intimacy takes place, but sometimes," she sighed, "there just isn't time."
Dirk ran his fingers up either side of his nose again.
"I thigg id id trader," Dirk said at last.
"Straighter," Sally said. "Say 'straighter' properly. It'll help you feel better. "
"Straighter," said Dirk. "Yed. I thee wad you mead."
"What?"
"I see what you mead."
"Good," she said with a sigh of relief, "I'm glad that worked. My horoscope this morning said that virtually everything I decided today would be wrong."
"Yes, well you don't want to believe all that rubbish," said Dirk sharply.
"I don't," said Sally.
"Particularly not The Great Zaganza."
"Oh, you read it too, did you?"
"No. That is, well, not for the same reason."
"My reason was that a patient asked me to read his horoscope to him this morning just before he died. What was yours?"
"Er, a very complicated one."
"I see," said Sally, sceptically. "What's this?"
"It's a calculator," said Dirk. "Well, look, I mustn't keep you. I am indebted to you, my dear lady, for the tenderness of your ministrations and the loan of your coffee, but lo! the day wears on, and I am sure you have a heavy schedule of grievous bodily harm to attend to."
"Not at all. I came off night duty at nine o'clock this morning, and all I have to do all day is keep awake so that I can sleep normally tonight. I have nothing better to do than to sit around talking to strangers in cafes. You, on the other hand, should get yourself to a casualty department as soon as possible. As soon as you've paid my bill, in fact."
She leant over to the table she had originally been sitting at and picked up the running-total lying by her plate. She looked at it, shaking her head disapprovingly.
"Five cups of coffee, I'm afraid. It was a long night on the wards. All sorts of comings and goings in the middle of it. One patient in a coma who had to be moved to a private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. I wouldn't pay for the second croissant if I were you. I ordered it but it never came."
She pushed the bill across to Dirk who picked it up with a reluctant sigh.
"Inordinate," he said, "larcenously inordinate. And, in the circumstances, adding a 15 per cent service charge is tantamount to jeering at you. I bet they won't even bring me a knife."
He turned and tried, without any real hope of success, to summon any of the gaggle of waiters lounging among the sugar bowls at the back.
Sally Mills took her bill and Dirk's and attempted to add them up on Dirk's calculator.
"The total seems to come to 'A Suffusion of YelIow'," she said.
"Thank you, I'll take that," said Dirk turning back crossly and relieving her of the electronic I Ching set which he put into his pocket. He resumed his hapless waving at the tableau of waiters.
"What do you want a knife for, anyway?" asked Sally.
"To open this," said Dirk, waggling the large, heavily Sellotaped envelope at her.
"I'll get you one," she said. A young man sitting on his own at another nearby table was looking away at that moment, so Sally quickly leaned across and nabbed his knife.
"I am indebted to you," said Dirk and put out his hand to take the knife from her.
She held it away from him.
"What's in the envelope?" she said.
"You are an extremely inquisitive and presumptuous young lady," exclaimed Dirk.
"And you," said Sally Mills, "are very strange."
"Only," said Dirk, "as strange as I need to be."
"Humph," said Sally. "What's in the envelope?" She still wouldn't give him the knife.
"The envelope is not yours," proclaimed Dirk, "and its contents are not your concern."
"It looks very interesting though. What's in it?"
"Well, I won't know till I've opened it!"
She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope from him.
"I insist that you--" expostulated Dirk, incompletely.
"What's your name?" demanded Sally.
"My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently."
"And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that have been crossed out?" She frowned, briefly, looking at them.
"No," said Dirk. "Certainly not."
"So you mean the envelope is not yours either?"
"I--that is--"
"Aha! So you are also being extremely . . . what was it?"
"Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis."
"How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don't look like a private detective."
"No private detective looks like a private detective. That's one of the first rules of private detection."
"But if no private detective looks like a private detective, how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there."
"Yes, but it's not one that keeps me awake at nights," said Dirk in exasperation. "Anyway, I am not as other private detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense of the word, chaotic. I operate by investigating the fundamental interconnectedness of all things."
Sally Mills merely blinked at him.
"Every particle in the universe," continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, "affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don't, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can't."
He paused, and said, "Please will you let me have the envelope and the knife?"
"You make it sound as if someone's life depends on it."
Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.
"I rather think somebody's life did depend on it," he said. He said it in such a way that a cloud seemed to pass briefly over them.
Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.
The knife was too blunt and the Sellotape too thickly applied. Dirk struggled with it for a few seconds but was unable to slice through it. He sat back in his seat feeling tired and irritable.
He said, "I'll go and ask them if they've got anything sharper," and stood up, clutching the envelope.
"You should go and get your nose fixed," said Sally Mills quietly.
'"Thank you," said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.
