A Caprice

Part 1 - The Portly Pitiful Policeman -

An early autumn morning defines the beginning of this story. Rising with a heavy degree of pride and effort, Mr. Gabriel John Dolby woke early for his duty. His pair of, fat, sunken eyes, which changed from their sulky state usually only in rage, shone dimly, with a dignity deep behind a glaze of fatigue and despair that thickened daily.

As of late he had grown more disenchanted with his home. The place stood healthily adorned with things that seemed to become more foreign to him by the day, for it was true that he had aquired them at a time of merriment now quite alien to him; they were sculptures and pieces from his past, relics of a time no longer, a time missed.

Short smokey curls sat on his dumpling head, receding, nearing pointless like defunct wires, though combed when summoned by superiors, or when expecting a visitor. A woollen, undeniable uniform of blue close to black imbued him with the sense of respect which kept his civility suspiring. There was clearly a man within him, responsive to orders, respective of hierarchies and disgusted by savagery, but capable of a certain form of carnage, regardless of the badge on his breast.

Prepared for his promenade, a monotonous route close to three miles, he sighed casually, usually, fastening a thick leather belt around his portly waist. With a somewhat dignified motion he sat his badged-helmet on his bulbous head then set off, striding forward embracingly, assuming the authoritative air he was familiar with seeking. The musk of lifeless leaves, scrunched and muddy, rose from beneath his feet, enterering his nostrils, signifying the beginning.

First he passed the bakery, the smell of which found him fondly, ushering him onwards. The owner was on friendly terms with him, and often gifted him with free fresh bread, for more than once he’d chased out some young scoundrel who’d set his mind on pilfering something or the other. The baker was forever grateful, and a kind, scrawny, jittery man, obviously weak in demeanour, who dubbed honesty as the highest virtue, and never let a chance to show his gratitude slip. This routine reception of fond regards defined the early point of Gabriel’s walk, and nourished the humanity within him, and too his faith in humanity. Either for better or worse, as with his alertness diminished he was slower in recognising the next ruffian who meddled considerably enough to warrant this policeman’s intervention. Our sensitivity to social mirth is regularly lulled by the sweetness of some social gesture, and we are thus hit harder at the sight of new debauchery when our minds are reminded of its prominence in reality, the compensation befalls us naturally.

After the dense smell of warm baked goods and the baker’s meek greeting, Gabriel’s journey began its descent into the urban gloom of the streets, rife with drunkards and shifty children seemingly orphaned and undoubtedly reckless. At every corner there was to be some small collective who skulked away rapidly at the sight of a policeman back into whatever “den of sin” out of which they emerged. This, in itself, convinced Gabriel of his worth so to speak; he had not to yell nor point a finger for some fiends to scurry out of sight, and he felt, glimpsing these instances, his potency pulsating, like he mattered and played a commendable role in his society.

His crimson gums had recently given birth to an abscess, though he was yet to pay it enough attention before truly discerning its severity. To him it served as another alibi to “drink for the pain”. It would worsen.

True: he had taken his role to heart, albeit he had no wife to fill that place, hence the depths with which he regarded his occupation. So little surprise is due when I say that once his duty was finished, he sank into that world so familiar to him, the typical, apathetical, lonesome world of sipping fiery fluids until dozy enough to justify sleep. In his proudest moments, scarce though they were, and becoming indeed more so, he came close to regarding himself as an agent of God, or at least a servant. Perhaps it was for that reason his beloved baton bore the engraved name St. A, after Saint Apollonia, a picture of whom his mother had cherished and left to him which now hung on his bedroom wall, though he never could interpret it fully, it was, to him, a picture of his mother rather than from, holy, but maternal.

Part 2 - The Return of Franz Kern -

‘My dear, Franz, so good to see you. I was starting to worry that barren wasteland had got the best of you. No cannibals try to have their way with you, I hope.’

‘Jas, you really should travel. It’ll dispel those crude notions of yours. And besides, I was in the east, not the west, which I admit does harbour some madness - and cannibals.‘


‘Of course, I’m just teasing. I don’t doubt you found yourself a plush little alcove to sip tisanes and write all night, few of them that there probably are in that place. But take a seat, hang the jacket and let’s talk! Very nice jacket by the way. I’m assuming you didn’t buy it here which means there’s got to be a tailor with a modicum of sense and civility in those lands too.’

‘Damn right!” replied Franz, removing his colourful blazer, proud of his eccentric attire and equally so of his friend’s admiration for it.


‘There’s some tea on the table and I can get some coffee if you want it.’ Franz sat. ‘Charlotte, sugar-plum, could you bring us some brandy! And one of the finer ones please! I know I have some rubbish down there.’ Jasper yelled amicably to his housemaid.

‘I’m fine with just the brandy.’ Jasper sat too.

‘So, give me the highs and the lows and the foxy business in between.’


‘You want the mundane first or—‘


‘-Oh, you know me, Franz, I don’t want the mundane at all.’ Charlotte arrived with the tray of brandy and two fine glasses. ‘Thanking you, treacle pie.’ The maid smirked as she always does, without the anxiety or care of displeasing the jester-like Jasper, for she had grown so very accustomed to titles such as ‘sweet-cake’, ‘sugar-plum,' ‘buttercup’, but was hardly the type of women to long for this addressing from a man, even in the amorous sense, brisk and conventional as she was. She served Jasper because doing so was free from tyrannical dictates, she could shout what a lunatic she thinks he is free from repercussions, laugh at him with no restraint, however that does not mean to say she didn’t find him totally ingratiating much of the time.

As Jasper poured the brandy, Franz begun.
‘I guess I could just go straight to the foxy business.’ His hand reached for the glass.


‘By all means, please do.’ Their glasses collided with amicability.


‘Tatiana.' Franz could not repress nor hardly discern his own grin that uttering the name of his new lover inspired. Jasper swallowed his brandy with fervour and replied jovially.


‘Franz, I like her already. Tell me about her - looks first, naturally.’


‘Her looks are the primary reasons I can articulate as to why I love her! A set of muddy green eyes will look at you should you meet her. Jas, she’s stunningly attractive! Elegant beyond belief. And when I procure for her the most ravishing assortments of clothing she has no trouble brushing up like a queen. She has this chirpy little voice and smiles like a cherub, with this intense aura that overwhelms completely, so much more potent than her voice and face suggest.’

Franz was indeed intoxicated with adoration, although his report to Jasper was quite accurate. Tatiana did have “muddy green eyes” and could be easily described as elegant. But he failed to speak of her oval face which, devoid of her tense smile, often cast a martial, inquisitive look, close to authoritative maybe, and very seldom nervous. Her physique stood somewhere soundly between lissom and hefty, given her height, making her a not only alluring in the eyes of Franz.

‘I met her in this humble hotel eight days before coming back. There was no way I was returning without her; the love she has for me is the source of all the power I feel now. I feel inspired to write, happy to converse and buoyant when I walk. And the best thing about her is that she’s provocative - not by nature but by virtue of my love for her. I’m so attentive to her wishes and behaviours that I wager she could flick her wrist and set me diving in front on a train. Of course it’s wild, but that’s why I’m so keen to nourish it. If there’s a fire within one why not find the heights to which those flames can rise?’

‘Franz, you exhibit the soul of a poet: a wet soul. I could never relate to such surrender to a glittery emotion. You compare it to a burning fire rather than a wilting flower. It’s delightful, might I add - impressive even. There’s merit in a man of such vehement romance, but not much in it save for the woman. Her caprice is your command I suppose?’

‘And I’m proud that it is.’ Jasper bore a great wide grin. ‘It is the very love itself which inspires me to chant so boldly about the love, and I love it! Laugh all you want - I love it!

‘So you do, Franz, that much is clear. I’m truly pleased for you, though I can’t profess my faith in the continuation. Best of luck, and all, but come on, Don, you know where I stand.'

‘I do: in that box of solitude from which you can peek out with your satirical eyes.' Jasper laughed. "You know what’s exhilarating for me in the world of love that you'll never taste? It's that desperation, when all bets are stacked on the actions of a loved one. You see when you’ve put all you’ve got on red, and red keeps coming in, the reward is all more great.’

‘And, so, when the black comes in?’


‘You knew the risk of putting it all on red, part and parcel, my friend. Of course you’ll relish in the misery, savour the wine of suffering, spend those nights sleepless and throbbing haunted by what you need the most. But the red rolled in, and it’s red red red right now, my friend.’


Franz bewildered his companion, but it was nothing especially novel. Jasper knew his manner well and America hadn’t seem to change him much.

Franz Kern was a short, well-proportioned man, with thick features, a fleshy, creased forehead, large ears and a somewhat bulbous but aquiline nose that constituted a countenance easily dictated by emotion. He spoke with his whole face rather than merely a mouth; dramatic, engaging, and sometimes repulsive.

‘You still dawdling around with that nervous fella? Bill?


‘Bill! He’s not all too shaky nowadays, I think. He’s stiffened up, and rightly so - thanks to his wife I think. In half a minute he can give me migraine, seldom but he can. He needs to relax. The chap’s finding his feet, so to speak. He doesn’t gamble like he used to… you remember how he was.'

Part 3 - The Velvet Casino –

In a place far more seedy than Jasper’s home we find a frantic, slender, prematurely grey man, gambling small stakes on a game of roulette. This chap, much younger than his appearance implied, currently drenched in the smoke of surrounding cigars hanging from the lips of cacophonous louts, spent most of his waking hours with his fingers in his mouth. At every second he seemed to be habitually obsessed with chomping his nails. If he was anxious, he would bite them; if he was waiting, or curious, or drowsy, indifferent, excited, thinking, reading, observing, doubtless he would bite them.

‘Twenty-nine, my black brethren!’ hailed his strident voice. He’d just made a meagre profit. Others looked at him, screwed their brows at his outburst, blew smoke in a way they hoped conveyed their disapproval, but Jordan was a regular, especially at the roulette table, and furthermore, he was curiously unconcerned with social judgements and conformity.

The casino sheltered the not only the louts bound to their drink but the silent ones forever musing over a potential win, a grand scheme to guarantee profit and prevent loss... Such a blend of personas gave the atmosphere an adaptable nature, with pockets of place to find that suit your temperament so long as you didn’t mind the general noise, the permanent clouds of smoke and perspiration, the atmosphere of develish haste and anticipation. Initially it had been established for the wealthier middle-class, yet the sheer allure of potential free money sucked in the scattier, desperate types soon enough; the furniture once gleaming and inviting lost its charm with scorch marks, tears and stains quickly. So, by now, it was not just those in finer suits who were found rambling, drinking, smoking and gambling, you would find the skinny figures of poverty with their burning eyes glued to a table of cards or a spinning wheel or the rolling dice, clutching at the imminent result with often their whole livelihood dangling over the abyss of a probable loss.

Opposite Jordan, in the same haze of smoke and avid gamblers, betting on the same game we find Bill, Jasper’s nervous compatriot, currently losing more than he intended to, watching Jordan’s celebratory expression with his squishy, blue eyes venomously. A man prone to the fiery judgements of anyone, and, unlike Jordan, quite perturbed by behaviours he knew to deviate from common respect and conventionality. Even his presence in the club would mean a scorching from his wife, should she find out, for Lillian knew of this vice of his,— perhaps not how far down his queer rapacity stemmed — most who knew him did, and already it had been the source of many nights of hot contention between the couple.

Bill usually only played roulette when his luck was already scarce. After losing enough games of cards and looking for a quick pick-up, he waddled up with dangerous avidity to the wheel, without a system to guide him, just a fiendish lust copulating with his desperation, a disingenuous, fragile audacity commanding his choices. Like any true gambler, when his recklessness paid off, the spirit of conceit was nourished in direct proportion to the sum of winnings. It had happened before; however, tonight, it did not. Bill lingered a little longer, penniless and plagued with that familiar self-hatred, along with the alacritous fantasies of what might have occurred had he chosen different numbers or played a little different. These fantasies are seamless and eternal in the mind of a gambler, and always in vein.

That night, a trifle jollier than Bill, Jordan left sensibly with a considerable sum of money — that is, considerable relative to his status as an argumentative, outcasted pauper. He was indeed an outcasted pauper, with an active mind and a shrill voice; too, an undeniable lust for philosophical speculation which caused him many unsettled evenings, generating, for him, enough self-doubt and essential questions of existence to keep any stable equilibrium at bay.

On his way home the frigid autumn air that brushed his rough physiognomy was not enough to dismantle his construction of satisfaction, built from the bricks of luck, but, in his zippy mind, maybe from the stones of skill.

‘I’ve lost enough to learn enough,’ so the pauper thought.

Jordan, during his hasty march home, bumped into a tall, maudlin-faced man. It was Bill.

A little lunar light did reveal their faces somewhat, yet both were unsure if the faces fit the ones they discerned at the Casino. Mutually uninterested in raising conflict, they continued on, uttering nothing, perhaps a faint wisp of apology. Then it clicked for Bill, it was the jammy winner at the Casino. Bill stopped in the twilight, turned to look back, knowing of the winnings he would be carrying - but Jordan’s figure faded in the shadows of the buildings, in the air of the night.

What proceeded might be best described as possession. Bill walked sinisterly slow in that twilight; it made him look quite romantically melancholy, although it wasn’t exactly melancholia that possessed him. His friend Jasper came to his mind, more specifically Jasper’s seemingly superfluous inherited wealth. Jasper was no more than a man who sits on plush chairs and eats finely, free from the world of monetary concern - that’s how Bill now saw him, or a creature within Bill. Not the memories of the sweetest parts of his wife retrieved him from this attitude; in this condition, he schemed. Filching a sum of Jasper’s money and gambling with it, to then return the sum he took before Jasper could ever know.

Part 4 - Jasper Jealousy

Bill’s friendship with Jasper gave him certain insights into how he was going to burgle his companion. The house he knew quite well, thus the locations to penetrate it.

Possessed, he made his way to Jasper’s house the early morning after his loss. As far as Bill could remeber, Jasper liked to take a walk in the early morning, he knew the house well enough to scurry to the location of draw full of guarenteed money and get out in what he thought should be less than two minutes. If Jasper was home, Bill would wait.

The house looked empty, but eager smoke rose from the chimney. 'That could be the maid's doing,' thought Bill. Either way, in his mental condition, it wouldn't be hard to fabicate an alibi as to why he had arrived, should anyone ask. Even if Jasper happened somehow to be home, Bill pemeditated the notion of simply acting as though he were being his usual lowly self and was on his way to ask for a little loan, should he be seen.

He entered, while images of cards and numbers lurked in his mind.

A man was sat smoking and sketching simultanously, in a cool, indifferent way, sitting in the kitchen.

'Bill? Howdy, fella! I haven’t seen you in a fair few years. I expect you’re looking for Jasper? He’s away temporarily with that pens and paper stuff. You can sit down if you like. We’ve got the maid dawdling around, as she does, she'll knock a few drinks up in you want to catch up?'

Bill had not seen Franz in at least a couple of years, and the two never really saw eye to eye. Franz wasn’t fond of his shaky stance, his leaning posture and the pitiful look of his face, which now glowed brightly as ever considering his orignal motive for being where he now was. 

Bill stammered a little, then bore the mask of the persona in the presence of who he saw as an annoying, cocky little man. 

‘I thought you was in America, Franz.’

‘I was. And now I’m in Jasper’s house - one of them.’ He placed down the shoddy sketch and turned to give Bill his attention. How much of it was feigned? Who knows?

‘Are you staying here?’ asked Bill, whilst understanding his plan had turned quite skewed.

‘No, no - just keeping the maid company. Well, as a matter of fact, there’s some documents which Jasper has agreed to help me with. I deplore bureaucracy and he’s the money-monkey with the administrative nature; as a kind of favour for favour, I watch over this humble abode and he’ll take care of my paperwork. It'll only take a day, maybe two, but I'm happy to pay someone a little something to cut out the parts of life I don't like.'

'So a rich man with a whole mountain of inheritance runs around to do your errands for a tad dollar? He must be bored, why doesn't he go to church? There's one right by his house.'

'Maybe he hasn't commited enough sins... And like I said, Jasper's good with that paperwork. Me: I'm up to my knees with just passport papers. You look vexed there, Bill, what's the matter?'

'Nothing. I should just collect what I came here for.'

'Which is?'

'A letter Jasper wants me to deliver to a relative of mine. He's left it for me.' Franz's squished face behind his twirling streams of smoke looked curious. But he never liked Bill, and would rather him gone from the house as soon as possible than enquire as to why Jasper never said Bill would be coming by. A wave of facial relaxation then ensued, and Bill proceeded to Jasper's personal office.

His heart pumped in his shivery, lengthy body. Frantically searching for Jasper's key, soon he found it where he'd discerned him place it sometime before. He knew the draw, unlocked it; it was full of cash.

Bill took as much as his nervous rapidity would let him; in such haste he abandoned even covering up his tracks, he knew Franz was nearby and probably skeptical anyway: he panicked, set to run out of the house. Not so artful.

Franz heard the ruckus.

'Got what you need, Bill?'

Doors flung open; a lanky, desperate man tried quickly to make his way to the front door, ignoring Franz's imminent intervention.

'This will be returned!' he shouted. Franz darted up from his seat for pursuit, chasing Bill out of the house. He headed straight into the church virutally opposite Jasper's house. Inside was a drunken, exhausted, babbling Gabriel, off-duty and weeping to God.

'Hold it! You lowlife gambler!' Franz's voice echoed through the church.

'I need this money temporarily - Jasper can have it back! He'll hardly notice it's gone. How is it right, huh? That he sits with his riches and shares none! I was supposed to be his friend.'

Franz gave a leaden sigh. 'I'm not religous, Bill, but it's funny you stand in a church with a handful of stolen money and preach of what's right and wrong. Maybe preach morality when you at least have the robe? - Or not the stolen cash?'

Gabriel was listening in his drowsy frame of mind.

'Anyway, Bill, my father was religious.' The voice still beamed across the stained-glassed walls and the expansive cielings. 'He used to tell me not to be like Cain, the sad cynic. He said bitterness will make one weak, that-'

'-Stop where you are, thief! How dare you steal in the house of the Lord!' interjected Gabriel stupidly.

'And you are?'

'A person of the law. He is a criminal, is that right, sir?' Gabriel asked Franz. 'Stolen money, isn't it?'

Franz was provoked by that question. Something inside of him shifted, for he suddenly wondered what indeed consituted a criminal. In that church, chasing that thief, his morality was shaken. For once, to this profound degree, he questioned his authority, who he was to deem the rules.

'No... No, sir. Put a lid on it: I've made a mistake; that money is not stolen. I've gotten terribly confused. I apologise to you,' continued Franz, peering at Bill. 'I'll be going now. There's no need for any trouble making here. Adios, men!'

Franz left the church, plodding back pensively to Jasper's house. The two were good enough friends that he needen't worry about the believability of what happened; they both knew, especially Jasper, just how gripped Bill was by his vice. Then franz sat, and instead of his fracture in moralistic thinking, he thought of Tatiana. Perhaps because it unsettled him.

'Charlotte! Could you whip me up a tea, please? Just usual, lots of cream!'