Lanceheim

by Tim Davys

  The night of the third Thursday in October, Duck Johnson and Maximilian were standing on cucumber green place St. Fargeau in northwest Tourquai, looking across the street. The National Bank was on the other side, a heavy stone building of granite and concrete, gray and awe-inspiring with a thick flagpole pointing straight up from the facade like a rhinoceros horn. Behind the rows of pillars on which the bank’s projecting roof rested, the entry doors could be glimpsed.

  For three weeks I had been up knocking on the door to Maximilian’s apartment on Leyergasse every other day without being let in. I tried to convince myself that it served me right, that I had fallen into the classic trap of defining myself through others; that it might actually be useful for me to realize that I was Wolf Diaz, not simply Maximilian’s Recorder. But that sort of self-deception is not for me. I cannot describe painfully enough the shame and terror I felt as I went up the steps on Leyergasse, aware that all that awaited me on the second floor was the uncompromising Duck’s vacant gaze.

  I should have given up, accepted my fate, and resumed some sort of life, but I did not do that. I spent hours every day outside Maximilian’s entryway, and I sought support and sympathy from everyone I encountered. I knew I was making a fool of myself, but I did not care.

  Excuse me.

  This emotional digression has nothing to do with the night when Maximilian and Duck stood on the sidewalk across from the National Bank. Nothing. Back to the matter.

  The Midnight Breeze was playing with the mauve, richly embroidered caftan that Maximilian had put on, and Duck nodded brazenly.

  “Not much to wait for,” he said, stepping out into the street.

  Maximilian followed a few steps behind. They were a strange pair. In the glow from the streetlights they crossed the deserted place St.-Fargeau, one in hat and suit with his lightly swaying and at the same time stiff gait, the other close behind, soft and lithe but nonetheless uncomfortable in the peculiar body the factory had allotted him.

  “Are we really going to get in?” Duck Johnson asked nervously as they approached the bank.

  He had been here a few times the week before to reconnoiter. On the street level the bank consisted of two halls, more than twenty meters to the ceiling and large as small cricket fields. There were cashiers and all the rest of the customer operations. The offices were in the building’s upper stories, and in the cellar was the vault. In order to get there, Duck and Maximilian would be compelled to force three doors of bulletproof glass and then make their way through the almost absurdly thick vault.

  On recommendations from Armand Owl, Duck had kept Maximilian ignorant of what the intent of this nighttime expedition was. Duck did not know, of course, who the owl was or why he had chosen him. At the same time this was of no importance.

  “We’ll go in here, and go down to the cellar,” Duck explained. “Do you think you can help me?”

  “I can help you,” Maximilian replied.

  “Because it’s locked this time of day,” Duck clarified.

  They were almost at the bank. Maximilian reached out his hand and took hold of the duck’s wing.

  “Close your eyes,” said Maximilian.

  Duck closed his eyes and reduced his speed, but Maximilian kept walking. When Duck dared open his eyes again, they were inside the bank’s first hall.

  “How…?”

  “Are we there?” asked Maximilian, looking around.

  He had never been in a bank before. After first growing up in Das Vorschutz and then being shut up at Leyergasse, there were many things in our ordinary lives that Maximilian did not know about.

  “There? Not yet, really,” said Duck.

  Presumably they had already set off some of the alarms. There ought to be motion detectors in the bank, perhaps heat sensors. The opportunity was in acting quickly.

  “We’ll go down one flight,” said Duck. “Follow me.”

  Duck walked quickly, and when they came down the stairs, they saw the great vault right ahead of them.

  “Here,” said Duck.

  The procedure from the street was repeated: Maximilian took hold of Duck’s wing and together they went right through the vault door. Duck was less surprised this time, and the sensational feeling from before was suddenly colored by discomfort. Duck and Maximilian stood silently next to each other in the darkness. The stench in the vault was nauseating; it reeked of excrement and rotten fabric.

  “Are we there?” asked Maximilian.

  Duck found the electrical panel to the right of the vault door, and turned on the ceiling lights. The reason for the overpowering smell was a few meters away from them. Fifteen, perhaps twenty pallets of old bills, impossible to trace and already deregistered; early tomorrow morning they would be driven away—escorted by the military in armored vehicles—out to the Hole at the Garbage Dump, where they would go up in smoke forever.

  Duck gasped for breath. Maximilian looked around and realized where he was.

  “We are in a bank vault,” he declared without surprise. “What are we doing here?”

  Duck had opened his long coat, and from the specially sewn inside pockets he took out four linen bags. They had been carefully folded, and when he unfolded them, they proved to be larger than you might think. He gave two of them to Maximilian, who took them but stood still.

  “What are we doing here?” he repeated.

  Duck had discussed this situation with Armand Owl. It was unavoidable that Maximilian would ask the question at last, and that it must be answered.

  “We’re in a bit of a hurry,” Duck explained.

  The pallets of money were secured with rope and covered with plastic. Duck took out a small pocket knife and made a long cut in the plastic, at the same time as he started gathering bundles of bills and placing them in the first bag.

  “I’ll tell you later. The money belongs to no one, it’s going to be burned, and when I think about the poor stuffed animals in Yok…it simply doesn’t feel right. We have to save the money. For Yok’s sake. And…if you want…everything you see here can be yours.”

  Duck dug deeper into the nearest pallet, but Maximilian remained motionless.

  “Here,” said Duck, pointing with his wing to the cut he had made with the knife. “Go ahead. I’ll take another one, take this one here.”

  Duck went deeper into the vault, and the sound of yet another cut with the knife was heard. While Duck continued working in silence, Maximilian remained mute.

  How great was the chance that this coup would succeed? Probably negligible. Armand Owl had devoted great care to assuring Duck Johnson that whatever alarms might be set off, they would have at least fifteen minutes in the vault.

  This had been a lie.

  Duck had not even had time to fill the first bag with bills before he heard the sound of a series of mechanical clicks from the vault door; it sounded like iron pipes dropped on asphalt. The vault was about to be opened from outside.

  After that things went very quickly.

  The police stormed in, ten specially trained attack police in riot gear from the renowned Nashville district in Amberville.

  As soon as Duck and Maximilian had gone through the hall on the upper level, they had set off the alarm, and the call-out had highest priority. Before the police force arrived, they had received information from command central that the thieves were in the vault; in principle motion detectors covered every square decimeter of the premises. When a few minutes later the police themselves investigated the place, they found that the vault was closed and locked. To open it required authorization from the bank management, and only after repeated confirmations from command central did the police receive this authorization. The sigh that met them when the vault door glided open was tragic and comic at the same time.

  A single, grotesque being dressed in a long caftan and with a kind of shawl wrapped around his head was standing before a pallet of bills. On the floor beside him was a bag half filled with money.

  No trace of Duck Johnson
was seen, but at the same time the police were not searching for anyone else. It was obvious who had committed this crime.

  The prosecutor’s office found us through the dry cleaners. After Maximilian had spent a few days in jail, one of the guards discovered the pink receipt that the Siamese always clipped to the collar on Maximilian’s mauve caftan when I made use of the Siamese’s establishment on Hüxterdamm. On the receipt was a telephone number that the guard dialed, and the Siamese recognized the item of clothing from the description; the embroidery on the caftan depicted a swan with a rhinoceros horn on its forehead. In that way the guard got my name and telephone number.

  They called late in the afternoon, when the breeze had slackened and the blue of the sky had intensified, and the joy I experienced when the acting prosecutor described the peculiar individual who was jailed for attempted break-in at the National Bank cannot be exaggerated. I struggled not to scream out loud. I confirmed Maximilian’s identity, provided information about family situation and address, and then ran the whole way over to Adam Chaffinch to tell him the good news. Fortunately there were no more than five minutes between us; I have never been a very athletic animal.

  That same evening I made my way to lemon yellow Kaufhof and the peculiar police station that was the headquarters for this part of the city’s constabulary: a mauve building reminiscent of a fairy-tale castle, complete with towers and pinnacles. The jail—the largest in all of Mollisan Town—was directly connected to the police station, and the contrast could not have been more conspicuous. From the outside the jail resembled an aboveground bunker, an almost windowless monolith in which Maximilian was imprisoned.

  I had never been in the police station before, but I had still heard a lot about it. Here the legendary Major Fendergast had command, and he was one of the primary reasons that Lanceheim remained underrepresented in the crime statistics. At least that was what was said, but who knows. Perhaps it was Fendergast himself who spread that rumor?

  After having identified myself at the reception desk and been searched in a small room connected to the coatroom, they led me to the prisoner. Maximilian sat waiting on an uncomfortable Windsor-style chair in a cell with poor lighting that reeked of cigarette butts. I could not keep from smiling when I saw that he had made a headcloth from a pillowcase.

  “Maximilian,” I exclaimed, sitting down across from him, on the other side of the rusty table that was the room’s only furnishing, “I’ve been so worried.”

  Maximilian looked at me and nodded absently.

  “If you see the world through a soap bubble,” he said, “you don’t see clearly. But one thing is certain: Sooner or later the bubble will burst.”

  And I did not get more than that out of him. Maximilian had already confessed everything to the police; he had accounted for what had happened during the fateful night, and omitted neither odors nor colors. When I read the interrogation report a few months later, I was surprised by the wealth of detail; it was not like him. But there was not a word about Duck Johnson.

  Even when I met Maximilian in the jail that first time I had a hard time controlling my frustration. We sat there on either side of the table for another half hour, and I pressed him with questions that soon proceeded to theories and increasingly aggressive accusations. Not toward him, of course, but toward Duck. Finally Maximilian got up.

  “Enough now, Wolf,” he said. “If you can’t play hopscotch, it’s pointless to blame the one who drew the squares.”

  A police officer opened the door behind my back, and I was thereby forced to leave.

  “We’ll get you out of here,” I called in vain to Maximilian while the police officer escorted me along the claustrophobic corridor toward the exit. “We’ll get you out, as soon as tomorrow.”

  I found it absurd that the most good stuffed animal who has ever lived in Mollisan Town was accused of a crime. However honorably intended, my promise, however, proved as empty as the apartment on Leyergasse. During the month that led to the trial, we hired the best attorneys we could find, given our finances. All of them failed, because Maximilian did not cooperate. He made no credible account of how he had made his way into the bank or the vault, but worse yet, the attorneys could not get a single mitigating circumstance out of him. And when they pressed him harder, he replied with similes that these verbal acrobats of the law could neither understand nor use.

  On one occasion, in deep dejection, Adam Chaffinch went to the jail himself to see him. Even for Adam, Maximilian would not place any guilt on Duck Johnson.

  “The free will that leads your steps,” Maximilian is said to have explained to Chaffinch in one of the small interrogation rooms with rusty tables, “is your own. And when your free will leads you astray because you are no more than a stuffed animal, always remember this: Have confidence. Magnus will lead you right again.”

  For a deacon like Chaffinch, the citing of Magnus as an argument was easy to refute.

  “The responsibility we have for our lives, as long as we live them in Mollisan Town,” replied Adam, “we cannot avoid by referring to Magnus. True, our faith rests in his paws, but our lives are still our own. He is going to forgive us and have mercy on us however we choose to use our will.”

  When Maximilian heard these words, he smiled amiably, as when you hear a cub counting out loud for the first time. But he did not reply, and Adam Chaffinch too had to leave the jail with unfinished business. It was obvious that Maximilian did not intend to tell what had caused him to end up in the vault of the National Bank, much less disclose Duck Johnson’s participation.

  When the trial began—with a public defender because the attorneys we had hired had all withdrawn—Maximilian immediately declared himself guilty. And we understood that our only chance to exonerate him was to find Duck Johnson. During an intensive week of searching, we did all we could. I myself did not have time to be present at the court proceedings; I neither slept nor ate and spent every hour of the day following up what proved to be empty tips about where Duck might possibly be hiding.

  The judge who took care of the case was named Hawk Pius, and he was a certifiably tough bird. His small, peering eyes stared straight at Maximilian during the entire trial. Because the question of guilt was established, it was mostly about the length of the sentence. This sounded ominous. Even more disheartening was our pursuit of Duck; he had vanished without a trace.

  On the fifth day of the proceedings came the sentence. It was conspicuously severe considering the facts that the defendant had no previous record, no damage had occurred, and no money had disappeared.

  Maximilian was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  I wept when I received the news. Adam Chaffinch shut himself up in the sacristy and remained there almost twenty-four hours. Even now the days that followed form a kind of vacuum in my life, an absurd existence of meaninglessness and confusion, a fog of guilt and curses.

  Now I know that all of it had a meaning.

  Now I know that in his absence, the myth of Maximilian would grow with a force that no living stuffed animal, not even himself, would have been able to live up to.

  But this took time to realize, and the year that followed was the darkest in my life.

  REUBEN WALRUS 6

  His name was Giraffe Heine.

  Philip Mouse was waiting with Reuben Walrus outside a shabby restaurant on golden brown rue Ybry in south Yok. The Afternoon Weather was at a late stage, the temperature was falling fast, but the sky was still blue. It had been two days since Reuben had given the private detective the assignment, and he had already achieved some type of result.

  “Is it here?” asked Reuben.

  Philip Mouse nodded. The brim of his hat concealed the mouse’s eyes.

  “Just as sure as a female’s mysteriousness,” said Mouse.

  It was the surest thing he could think of.

  “Shouldn’t we go in?”

  “Soon,” said Mouse, crushing the glowing cigarette butt with his heel.


  Giraffe Heine had gone into the bar a good while ago, and what caused Philip to hold back his client, he himself was not sure of. Perhaps he feared that Reuben would be disappointed. After the rat had been in touch, Mouse had worked up a certain expectancy. He had phoned Reuben and told him the good, and the bad, news. True, he did not know where Maximilian was, but he had every reason to believe that they would get hold of the giraffe.

  During the past few days Philip Mouse had received a number of tips about the giraffe. A few were anything but reliable; others bore consideration. It started with Annette Afghan telling the same story to Philip that she had told to Reuben. Then a hamster who maintained that he knew where Giraffe Heine usually bought wine said that he had not had cancer of the throat, as the afghan alleged; instead it was something about his nose.

  From a yellow koala who claimed to know where Giraffe lived (which proved to be a lie or a misunderstanding), Philip found out that Maximilian had shown himself to Giraffe in a dream, and not at all in reality. Being in several places at the same time, said the koala, was a prerequisite for Maximilian. How else could he affect the lives of so many animals? The koala then hinted that he himself had seen Maximilian flash by in more than one dream. It was the koala who confirmed that the name of the giraffe was Heine.

  A beautiful pelican by the name of Linda—or was it Lina—could relate that Giraffe Heine worked as a proofreader at a publisher that primarily published university dissertations. She was quite certain that Giraffe had never met Maximilian. It was actually the case that Giraffe had a brother who as a youth had lost one of his feet in an escalator. Maximilian had come down from the sky as an angel and conjured forth a new foot for the brother. (Of all the stories that Philip uncovered, this was the most ridiculous. On the other hand, the beautiful pelican was correct in that Giraffe Heine did work at the University Press.)