The Cunning Gendarme
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Milosh had often shown a lot of resourcefulness while he was at the Police Academy. He was always first to come up with a novel solution to a seemingly impossible problem. When other cadets were baffled by the riddles of crime solving, Milosh had already worked out one or two angles. It was uncanny.
He'd graduated recently and had just been given the post of Police Chief, a new stage upon which he could display his skills. People would be dazzled.
To celebrate his newfound position, he’d taken up the practice of smoking cigarettes with a cigarette holder. Cigarettes, for the most part, didn’t have filters before World War II. Viceroys would have cork filters as early as 1936, but they weren't the norm. And then, many people rolled their own. A cigarette holder was a good accessory. It added a nice metropolitan touch, so Milosh naturally acquired one. It was a very attractive ebony-shafted beauty. It eliminated the need to spit out loose bits of tobacco, and, he felt that it made him appear polished and refined. After all, he was Chief of Police.
Lucky for him, he was assigned to a town not far from his boyhood home, the mountain village of Mokra Gora. He could have spent the rest of his life herding sheep like the rest of them up there, but he was deserving of better things, he thought. He was different. With this new job, he could be close enough to his family to see them if he wanted, but far enough away to live his life the way he wanted.
He patrolled the street that night as he usually did, looking for things out of the ordinary, things that needed to be made to conform. He liked it when things conformed. It made life orderly. Nothing on this night, though, seemed to be out of order. Nor did it require Milosh’s cleverness. There was a stray dog, but he just ignored it. Dogs always wandered the streets. It was nothing unusual.
Sometimes there was a fight between a couple of drunken villagers. That would require cleverness from Milosh because a fight between two drunks is a very delicate thing. A typical policeman — he and his colleagues referred to themselves as gendarmes — would be almost helpless trying to communicate with a drunk. Milosh, a cunning gendarme, was quite skilled and cagey when addressing drunks. Rather than simply clonking them on the head with a baton like a typical policeman, Milosh was able to somehow enter the hallucinatory world of the drunk and speak to him as a peer. There he could say things that the drunk would understand, then the drunk would behave.
Milosh was like one of those people in fairy tales that can talk to animals, and a drunk was like one of those animals. He was a Dr. Doolittle to the inebriated. He could, in a manner of speaking, get the drunk to roll over on his back and beg for a treat. The most difficult thing, though, was to get this animal to walk on his hind legs. That’s because drunks frequently move about on all fours... a by-product of their drunkenness.
What concerned Milosh more than anything on his route was curfew. It was important for people to conform to the curfew, otherwise chaos would certainly follow. It was 1933 and there were things to worry about and mischief for people to get into. To use the term mischief, though, is to severely understate the general political climate of the region. These were turbulent times, and the Slavic region of Europe is prone to turbulence as history has shown.
The less pressing, but still essential concern if we are to think in terms of mischief, was to keep tabs on the vexatious Gypsies. Ironically, the Gypsies were both admired and condemned at the same time. They were admired for their beautiful, spirited, infectious music, yet shunned because of their chronic tendency toward larceny. One would think that one characteristic had nothing to do with the other, but by a mysterious necessity, the two coexisted.
One might argue that society made the Gypsies larcenous. If it could only embrace them, society that is, there would be no reason for them to resort to their pilfering and slight-of-hand trickery. read more