Monday, June the 12th, 2006

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Spot the Flaw

Ratatatat! Ratatatat! Prohibition-era machine gun fire pursued Blodgett as he fled down an alleyway. He was panting, dripping with sweat, and made an easy target, decked out as he was in the colourful raiment of a Bolivian mountain goatherd. But the cops were poor shots, having only been issued with their new guns that morning, and their cack-handed bursts of ratatatat pinged harmlessly off dustbins and sheets of corrugated iron and other dustbins.

Blodgett hurled himself over an impossibly high brick wall at the end of the alleyway, landed on his feet, and—pausing to catch his breath and light a perfumed Serbian cigarette with his dainty, girly little lighter—he ran on towards the railway station. He had to get out of town fast. They were on to him, and if he were captured he was looking at twenty thousand years in Sing Sing, maybe even forty thousand years. Jumping a freight train, Blodgett settled himself in a boxcar with a pair of hobos. They had many discussions over the next few days, without a single platitude passing their lips. Blodgett began to think he could become a hobo himself. He practised introducing himself as such.

“Hello there, I am Blodgett, the Panglossian hobo,” he tried, until it was pointed out to him by one of his boxcar hobo companions that these were ill-advised words for a fugitive.

Convinced by the logic of this argument, Blodgett changed his mind and decided to hole up in a hideout until the heat was off. Sooner or later the cops would forget about him, distracted by paperwork, ratatatat practice, and the emergence of a previously unknown criminal mastermind bent on masterminding criminality. Tipping his hat to the hobos, he rolled off the freight train as it slowed on the outskirts of a shining city. It was a pitch black night, and Blodgett the Panglossian fugitive crept stealthily through the streets, chewing on a brazil nut, seeking an unlocked door in one of the large buildings among which he wandered. Dawn was still an hour away when he found one. He blundered into the deserted building and jammed the door shut behind him, piling up crates and boxes and cartons to seal himself inside. At last he was safe. He had overlooked just one thing…