Marxist Noir

It was quiet, too quiet: only the faint sound of capital accumulating disturbed the dreary LA afternoon, the lawns looking tired and old like some worn out member of the Comintern after a long stint at the bar.

Slavoj checked his watch. It was raining, the kind of rain that always made him nervous. The kind of rain that reminded him of Sarah. Why he had to get messed up in her schemes he still for the life of him couldn't figure out but oh, boy, how she loved to interpellate the lumpenproletariat. Trouble was, she could tell how much they enjoyed it. The whole country was one Tea Party away from blowing sky high and everybody knew it.

But all that was in the past. Too bad, thought Slavoj to himself, the sharp intake of breath as he sucked on the final stub of his cigarette audible only to this softly falling rain and the slow machinery of surplus value tick, tick, ticking in the background like a typist on morphine.

He edged closer to the small pile of items at the door. A coat, probably not too expensive by the looks of it. How many poor bastards worked their hearts out just for a bowl of rice as they put this together for some anonymous bourgeois functionary. Slavoj was not in the mood for speculating. Now, that was odd. Sewn into the lining in the collar was an object, he wasn't sure how big but it had a slight give to it, like an appendage of flesh.

Gingerly he removed his pocket knife and began to slice open the collar. If only the slow caress of the knife in the fabric hadn't reminded him so much of that time with Sarah. Something fell out on the lawn, a rolled up piece of paper about the size of a cheap pocket edition of the Communist Manifesto. But it was what was written on it that made him break out in a sweat, the first sweat he'd felt since that day in April when he realized that they were on to him.

Slavoj looked up in amazement—amazement was not something his face wore well. It made him wince when he thought about it later, fondling a shot at Lenin's on the corner of the godforsaken street he used to call home until April, that April. The message turned around and around in his mind like some old record of Sarah's that she'd forgotten to take off of the gramophone. “Congratulations Detective. You have found the secret of capital. But what are you gonna do about it?”