Amberville (8 page)

“Let us say,” continued Eric along this rhetorical path, “that the threat looks like this: if Dove is carried off by the Chauffeurs, an animal close to me is going to be carried off in a comparable way by the dove’s gorillas.”

“I understand,” said Snake.

“Just as important,” said Eric, speaking more slowly than he had during the evening up till now, “as you helping us find the Death List, is that you give me an answer to the question of how I’m going to be able to save that animal close to me if we don’t succeed. And, Snake, I believe we don’t have very much time.”

H
e turned slowly toward the skyline of Tourquai, a pincushion of the vanity and ambition of the builders. It was not by building monuments to himself that his greatness was manifested; that was not his way of defining power.

He himself was not interested in material things. He pretended to be materialistic because that gave him a kind of alibi; he owned a car he never drove and a house he seldom visited. His eyeglass frames were of the latest model, he wrote with an expensive pen and his shoes were purchased five floors up at Grand Divino. But these were disguises.

Power was not in owning, power was in directing.

He had the necessary means at his disposal, and he made use of them. He was a master of manipulation; with his words he could entice and seduce, poison and crush. It was a matter of logic. To have the ability to conceal it and then let it appear again in a manner which suited the overarching context. Nothing gave him the same satisfaction as when he succeeded in converting a resistant stuffed animal for his own purposes. Then he experienced moments of the dizzying intoxication of power, more powerful than anything
else. Then life was a matter of pursuing this intoxication over and over again.

The secret of the Chauffeurs was well hidden.

Eric Bear perhaps realizes that that is where he should begin, he thought, but it’s not going to come to anything. The Chauffeurs aren’t communicative, they’re completely inaccessible; it was for their lack of animal qualities that they were chosen for their filthy occupation once upon a time.

He laughed drily at the thought. A hollow laugh, which hurt at the top of his throat. He had never been good at laughing.

If for some reason the bear should get on the trail of something—he reminded himself that humility is a virtue—if the bear were to get on his trail, well, there were occasions when the patience-testing methods of manipulation didn’t suffice. There were animals who lacked sufficient comprehension to allow themselves to be guided by razor-sharp logic. There was a quicker, more direct language of power at hand when such was required. Physical violence didn’t fascinate him in the same way as lies and treachery did, but the effects of violence produced the same results. This applied to threats, bribery, and empty promises as well. The palette of techniques he used varied in beauty, but the end was, despite everything, more important than the means.

The bear could be stopped the moment he understood anything about the secret of the Chauffeurs. The next step, the step over that boundary, the bear would never have the opportunity to take. There were animals who could easily detach a head from its body and bury the two parts in the forests on either side of the city.

He tried to laugh again.

It didn’t go any better this time.

S
am Gazelle hated being alone.

Nonetheless he was sitting by himself in an old Volga Combi, staring out toward the night that had just settled over East Avenue. In the glow from the streetlights the broad street’s mint-green pavement was no more than a variation of black. A sparkling cross was hanging from the rearview mirror and there was a faint odor of damp fur from the car’s backseat. The avenue was empty. Cars were parked densely along the sidewalks on both sides. Sam could make out the Star in the rearview mirror. He was parked a few hundred meters onto East Avenue, five or six cross-streets from the roundabout, but he hardly knew how he’d managed to get himself there. He despised cars. There was hardly room in the compartment for his left horn. He had a crack in his right hoof that risked being caught in the gas pedal. The reason that he hadn’t refused was spelled l-o-v-e.

He couldn’t help it. Despite all the years that had passed. There was something quite special about Eric Bear.

Sam sighed heavily.

In honor of the evening, he had put on his light-blue velvet
jacket, and from the inside pocket he pulled out a small plastic container. Originally filled with throat lozenges, the container had been Sam’s mobile lifesaver for a long time; whenever he left home, he brought enough pills to gobble them all day. Now, as he was shaking out a portion of the contents of the container onto the passenger seat, it meant nothing to him. Two capsules and the rest compact, little round tablets. White, red, green, and one blue. He didn’t know what the pills were called, he hardly knew what they cost, and had no idea what effect they had in combination with each other.

He picked up a couple of them, assured himself that he’d gotten one of the blue ones, and collected saliva in order to swallow them all down in one gulp. The remainder could go back in the container. Hopefully he would feel less lonesome in a little while. Otherwise he would have to take a few more, perhaps more of the red ones?

On the street outside nothing was going on. You might think there ought to be more life and movement; the evening was young, and a few kilometers farther east on the avenue the first night animals were venturing out onto the sidewalks. Sam had forgotten the years when he’d been forced to search for company on the street, despite the fact that they weren’t so long ago. But sometimes the pain from a certain moment in the past might come racing through the years and torment him in the exact same way now as it did then. Therefore it was better to concentrate on what was going on around him.

But no red pickup drove past.

Snake Marek sat tensely
coiled around the steering wheel of a Volga Sport GTI, wondering how he would even be able to drive the car. He’d gotten a vehicle with reptile-adapted instrumentation, with automatic transmission, and with
the gas and brake pedals within a tail’s-length distance, but he hated twisting around the steering wheel and crawling back and forth in order to turn. He’d always thought that snakes that drove cars made themselves ridiculous. And in addition, he was still bitter about finding himself in this situation, together with his companions from before, and commanded by Eric Bear. His life was so lamentably unstable, he thought, and so impossible to calculate, since chance could never be determined, anyway.

The fortress he had constructed for himself at the Office of Grants had been demolished in a mere moment by a letter from a stupid rhinoceros. And Snake was not even sure Rhinoceros Edda had written the letter; it might just as well have been Eric Bear. This was a lesson, Snake thought with suppressed fury. When this little excursion was over and he returned to the ministry, he must take a look at his situation. He’d gotten too comfortable, he’d forgotten the rules of the game. In order to sit securely as boss, you had to conquer the next position in the hierarchy as well. And the next, and then the next.

Snake had gotten the bear to set out one car and one driver per avenue, and even if they didn’t get a bite this evening, there would be a bite during one of the coming nights. The city’s four great thoroughfares were used by everyone sooner or later, because these were quite simply the fastest alternatives. Mollisan Town was a massive city, and professional drivers soon tired of all the traffic lights and one-way streets, roadwork, and unreliable nighttime wanderers on the smaller streets. The Chauffeurs used the avenues; anything else was unthinkable.

North Avenue divided Tourquai to the west from Lanceheim to the east. In the middle of the lemon-yellow street a magnificent lane of willow trees had been laid out. It ran the entire way from the Star out to the end of the developed part of the city, after which the lane was absorbed into the
surrounding forest. Seen from the other direction, it was as though the forest had sent a scout right into the heart of the city via North Avenue.

Snake’s car was parked facing south, in toward the city. Due to the dense foliage of the willow trees, he had a hard time seeing very far, but nonetheless he’d managed to get a parking space which made it possible for him to discern a red pickup on its way north at a reasonably long distance. On the other hand, having time to turn around and follow after didn’t feel equally obvious. A U-turn of that type demanded that he writhe all the way from the right side of the steering wheel to its left, hop down onto the seat, and make the maneuver again. That took time.

He swore to himself, shaking his head.

In addition, it irked Snake Marek’s vanity that the assignment itself wasn’t more complicated. That self-righteous bear hadn’t needed to sabotage his life for this. Any fool whatsoever would have been able to figure out you have to find the Chauffeurs.

“Thus,” Snake Marek had said to his suddenly very anxious companions, “we follow a red pickup until dawn. The Chauffeurs are where the pickup is parked. And where the Chauffeurs are, we’re going to find the list.”

Snake’s need of sleep was minimal, and he had no problem keeping himself alert. A car or two drove past, mostly taxis, the typical, black cabs. He rolled down the window a few centimeters and listened to the restful, verging-on-poetic sound of the willow trees’ hiss as the night breeze passed through their foliage. There was a rhythm in the movement that inspired Marek. Perhaps the night would not yet be wasted?

Snake jumped down from the steering wheel. From the glove compartment he took out a pale-yellow notebook; he’d bought the surplus stock down at the stationery store.
The cover was tattered and worn, but there was nothing wrong with the paper inside. He grasped the pencil with his tail and quickly wrote:

a horseshoe, a sickle

a metaphoric tickle

the clever, the obtuse

continue to seduce

He lifted the point from the page and looked down at what he’d written. As usual he was seized by a kind of dizziness. It was so ingenious, so amazingly beautiful, that he scarcely dared believe that he himself had thought of it.

Perhaps he hadn’t?

And deep inside in his cold-blooded heart a faint hope was awakened to life. It was a feeling he hadn’t felt in almost twenty years. He knew that the surrounding world was still not ready for Snake Marek’s life’s work. That they wouldn’t understand, that no one could grasp it. No one.

Except possibly Eric Bear.

If each and every
one of the buildings which lined blood-red Western Avenue between Tourquai and Amberville had been a block in a box of toys, Eric Bear would probably have been able to take them out one by one and place them in the right order all the way from the Star out to the city limits. This was his childhood neighborhood; on the gravel path that ran parallel to Western Avenue on the Amberville side he had jogged every morning during all of secondary school. Unfortunately the familiar environment lulled him into a secure feeling of well-being that made it more and more difficult for him to keep his eyes open when the weather passed midnight. Ever since Nicholas Dove’s gorillas had broken
down the door at Uxbridge Street, the adrenaline had been supplied to the bear’s system in the same way as the injection engine on a Volga GTI. Now the direct infusion was cut off and Eric felt how exhausted he was. At this pause in the flood of events and demands, his eyes shut and he felt how his head began to whirl with fatigue. There was a faint aroma of vanilla in the car, and he wondered how that had happened.

He’d borrowed the cars at work. From his employees. For his own use he had humbly chosen a gray Volga Combi. It was owned by a mouse in the accounting department whose name he still didn’t know, despite the fact that she’d worked at Wolle & Wolle at least as long as he had.

He leaned his head against the neck rest and at the same time fingered the walkie-talkie lying on the seat beside him. In the shop he had been assured that the frequency which had been installed was unique. There were few walkie-talkies on the market with a comparable range, and thereby you avoided worrying about eavesdropping and interference. It could of course have been sales talk, if it hadn’t been for the price. Eric paid with a strained smile, and realized that there were few—if there was anyone—prepared to lay out a small fortune for a couple of phones.

He lifted the walkie-talkie, pressed the button on the side, and called the others. “Bear here. Everyone awake? Over.”

“Snake. Over,” said Snake.

“Gazelle. Over,” said Gazelle.

Then it was silent.

“Crow?” asked Eric at last, but he received no answer. “Crow, press the black button on the side. Over.”

There was a crackling sound. “Sure thing—damn—Crow here. Over.”

“We’ll check in again in an hour. Over and out.”

Eric put down the walkie-talkie on the seat, felt a violent
dizziness, a feeling like sitting in the first car on a roller coaster on its way down the first slope, and before he’d reached the bottom he was sleeping soundly.

Tom-Tom Crow had brought
four bags of peanuts and some knitting with him in the car. It was not a coincidence that they’d let him have the only Volga Mini that Eric had borrowed; it was so enjoyable watching the massive crow fold himself into the little car. But there was nothing wrong with the size of the interior, and Tom-Tom was sitting in the front seat, deeply absorbed in his knitting, when the red pickup came driving along South Avenue.

Tom-Tom saw it from the corner of his eye, but didn’t make note of it. He had just reparked the car to be able to keep better track of the stitches with the help of the streetlights. The knitting project Tom-Tom had embarked on was going to be a navy-blue sweater with a skull pattern in white on the back. The pattern demanded that he concentrate on the purls, and the red pickup drove past just as he was brooding over whether he’d made thirty-two or thirty-three stitches with the white yarn. On the thirty-fifth stitch he would change color.

There was a delay of a few seconds before the information which nevertheless had passed through his eye and moved on farther into the mysterious windings of the brain registered in his awareness.

He looked up.

“But…what the hell…” muttered the crow in surprise.