But, of course, I never once lost my now-firm grasp on the fourth law of secret police:
Shrieks of agony soothe the savage beast.
Nor the fifth:
Stoic silence inflames the policeman’s heart.
Nor—most important—the sixth:
Admissions of guilt stand in direct proportion to innocence. This, you will of course recognize, is but the obverse of the second law.
And so I interspersed my screams of agony with the most lurid confessions:
“Yes! Yes! I did it! I admit everything!” (Here I emitted a horrid shriek.) “I murdered the Popes—all twelve of them at once! The blood flowed like a river! O hideous impiety! And then!” (Here I dissolved into broken blubbering.) “I dismembered them! And ate them! O foul ecclesiophagy!” (Here I threw in the cackle of the criminally insane.) “And then! And then! After letting nature take its course, I defecated on holy ground! Like a wolf staking its territorial claim! Oh! Oh! I am a monster of depravity!”
“Not that, you idiot!” roared the sergeant. “Not the Popes! What about the King? What did you do to the King?”
“Which king?” Then, thinking I was bordering dangerously on proclaiming innocence, I immediately howled with glee and pain. “There have been so many! Butchered kings by the score, I have! The Kaysor of Kushrau I poisoned! And then—I fed the poisoned meat to his hounds! They died in agony! And then I cut the canines from the canines”—(here followed demonic shrieks of ecstasy at the pun)—”and with these newfound weapons I slew the Great Mogul of Juahaca! Plunged the teeth into his throat while he slept! Gave him a dog’s collar of his own!” (Lunatic laughter.) “And then! Oh! I murdered the Doges of the Philistine! All of them at one swoop! Crept up on them while—”
“Not that, you idiot!” roared the sergeant. “The King of Goimr! Here—in Goimr! What did you do to the King of Goimr!”
“Oh! Him!” Here I fell into a minute or two of insensate ululation, for at the mention of the King of Goimr, the two policemen applying the bastinadoes had fallen into a truly vigorous beating of my feet. Then: “I forgot him! There’ve been so many kings! But him! Yes! Yes! I remember now! I disemboweled him with a scythe! Danced a fandango with his guts!”
“The King’s still alive, you idiot! And not a mark on him! But he’s insane! How did you drive him mad?”
I gasped with shock. “Still alive! You mean I missed? With a scythe? Missed! I’m going mad myself! But that’s it! That’s it! It must have been the horrible sight of my demented leer—the ghastly scythe in my hands!—drove the King of Goimr mad! O wondrous! O wondrous! I am such a criminal! Such an archdevil! A paragon of purest evil! Drove the King mad! Yes! Yes! I remember now!”
“It’s looking bad, sir,” I heard one of the policemen say, his voice filled with discouragement. The bastinado slacked off.
But the sergeant was made of sterner stuff. “I’ll have none of it!” he roared. “You there! Apply the cudgels smartly! D’you hear me, you laggards?”
The bastinado renewed itself with a frenzy. Not to be thwarted, I immediately launched into a semi-coherent confessionary babble, recalling to mind all of the various crimes which my uncle Ludovigo had made me memorize. Fortunate I was in my training! On my own, I couldn’t have thought up a tenth of those deeds of villainy.
At length, the bastinado fell off again.
“It’s hopeless, sir,” came the same policeman’s voice, now sullen in its failure.
“Yes, I know,” came the sergeant’s morose reply. “Truth to tell, I lost heart earlier, when he confessed to seducing the Elf Queen’s unicorn and abandoning the beast in her pregnancy. But this latest! Kidnapped the magnetic monopoles. Prevented the decay of the proton. And then—did you hear him? Murdered every one of the world’s astronomers and cosmologists to protect the dark secret.”
“Perhaps,” came the obsequious voice of another policeman, “we could try the rack?”
“To what purpose, you fool?” demanded the sergeant. “What crime has he not confessed already?”
“Well,” hemmed the obsequious voice, “he hasn’t confessed to buggering and murdering the Maharaj of Naham.”