Lanceheim

by Tim Davys

  With every new tip, Mouse got a new version of what had happened. Soon he could see a pattern. Everyone he talked to begrudged the giraffe his experience, and tried to belittle or erase it. All were just as unconditionally possessed by Maximilian’s divinity and power.

  But the clues also led to skeptics. The receptionist at the University Press explained curtly to Philip that she did not know who Maximilian was, and did not intend to find out either. Neither Heine nor any other proofreader had a permanent position or employment at the publisher, she said, and she dismissed Philip as yet another in a series of religious fools who called to ask questions about the giraffe.

  “There’s nothing special about Heine,” she told him with irritation before he left. “And if he is supposed to have met some kind of shaman, then you can ask him why he always has a cold. Don’t miracles work on the sniffles?”

  Philip could not answer that question.

  It was through Daisy and her unfathomable network of social workers all over Mollisan Town that the tip about the bar on golden brown rue Ybry turned up. A rat at the social services office in south Yok took Daisy’s bait, and revealed that Giraffe Heine was one of his cases. There was no fixed address for the giraffe, but when the rat wanted to get hold of him, he would leave messages at the bar on rue Ybry, and most often he heard from Heine afterward.

  It was this information that Philip Mouse gave Reuben Walrus on the third day. The composer had been disappointed at first when he realized that Mouse had not gotten any closer to the trail of Maximilian, but then he cheered up and asked whether they could drive down to Yok immediately and look for the giraffe.

  “It’s your money,” Mouse replied.

  Walrus picked up Mouse in a taxi outside the detective’s office, and in silence they traveled southward to Yok’s bewilderingly narrow and incoherent blocks.

  “I have a few receipts that are due,” Mouse took the opportunity to explain.

  “Huh?”

  “Extra expenses. Doing investigative work isn’t free,” said Mouse.

  Walrus nodded, and Mouse took that as agreement.

  They were let out a few blocks from rue Ybry, because it would take the taxi driver an eternity to come back out on South Avenue if he drove up the whole way. Philip made sure to get out first to avoid paying. He led Reuben Walrus the few blocks up to the golden brown street, and after a short distance they found the bar.

  At the very next moment they caught sight of Giraffe Heine.

  At least it was a giraffe, and he was going into the restaurant.

  It was almost a parody. Philip had not had any plan, hardly even any expectation. And then the giraffe was the first one they ran into. If Mouse had not been such a confirmed fatalist, it would have been hard to dismiss the thought that higher powers had a finger in the game.

  “Now?” asked Reuben.

  Mouse nodded. “Sure. I’ll wait out here on the street. We don’t want to scare him.”

  It seemed wise.

  Reuben took a deep breath, gathered his courage, and a minute later crossed the street and went into the bar.

  It was the sort of place you would expect in a neighborhood like this.

  At first Reuben could not see anything, the place was so submerged in deep darkness. Rock music roared out of cracked speakers, loud enough to conceal the silence. Then Reuben made out ten or so stuffed animals spread out at round tables in a surprisingly large room. Low red kerosene lamps stood flickering on the tables. Reuben went over to the bar, where small lamps above the large mirror caused him to see himself ordering a beer.

  Giraffe Heine was sitting alone at a table to the right of the bar. He was sipping a whiskey and soda and seemed deeply submerged in himself. Reuben put the money for the beer on the bar, taking the mug with him to the giraffe’s table.

  “May I join you, my friend?” he asked with the low voice that the murmur and music seemed to require.

  And before he got an answer, he sat down.

  The giraffe sat quietly. His gaze was clouded, and despite the fact that a stranger had just joined him, he seemed to have a hard time being involved in the moment.

  “Who are you?” he finally forced out. “Are you from Social Services?”

  “Reuben Walrus,” replied Reuben with exaggerated formality. “I’ve been looking for you for several days.”

  “I don’t have a cent.”

  “I’m not interested in—”

  “Ask anyone, you know? Not a cent,” and the giraffe let his hoof sweep across the room with a kind of leisureliness that did not appear to agree with his narrow, long limbs.

  “What?” said Reuben.

  He did not want to admit it, but if he did not concentrate on what the giraffe was saying, if he looked in a different direction, he had a hard time hearing.

  “I don’t have a cent,” repeated Heine.

  “I’m here to talk about Maximilian,” said Reuben.

  The giraffe reacted. His gaze cleared; the entire stuffed animal stiffened.

  “Maximilian?” said Giraffe Heine. “Don’t think, like, I’ve ever heard of him.”

  There was something in the suspicious gaze and the immediate denial that convinced Reuben that Giraffe was lying.

  “I wish you no harm,” said Reuben. “And you don’t need to talk. I’m really not in pursuit of you—it’s Maximilian I want to meet. But you seem to be the only one who has actually met him.”

  “I haven’t, like, met him, you know?” the giraffe persisted. “And even if I had, I know nothing, like, about him, you know? Where he is or how you get hold of him, and that.”

  “Do you know anyone who knows?”

  “No.”

  “And you’ve never seen him again?”

  “No.”

  “But you must have been contacted by lots of animals like me, who wonder what happened and where Maximilian is staying.”

  “Hundreds.”

  “What?”

  “There have been hundreds like you here, asking.”

  Reuben pondered this.

  “It’s completely crazy,” sighed Giraffe Heine, sipping his whiskey and soda. “First the…impossible happens, you know? Then I can’t go home without being jumped, you know? Stuffed animals who think I’m some sort of guru, and the kind that are pissed off and want to punch me in the mouth. It really sucks. It was better before I met him, you know? Better that stomach than those…”

  The giraffe emptied his glass, and made a sign with his hoof to the bartender for another round.

  “You’re paying, you know?” he asked the walrus. “You all usually pay.”

  Reuben nodded.

  “Stomach?”

  “He healed me,” nodded Giraffe.

  “You were sick to your stomach,” asked Reuben, and hoped that his mustache concealed the smile that he couldn’t hold back. “That’s what it was about? You had pain in your stomach?”

  “It’s nothing to laugh at,” said Giraffe. “It hurt like hell. Hurt like hell, every day, year out and year in. Colic, like, or whatever it’s called.”

  Reuben held up a fin, as if to ask for forgiveness for his little smile. But Giraffe felt offended.

  “I spent half of my childhood at Lucretzia, in intensive care or up in gastronomy, you know? No one could help me, no one got, like, what it was.”

  Reuben attempted an understanding nod. Lucretzia was the hospital in Tourquai; it had a reputation of being the worst in the city.

  “And then he came,” declared Giraffe.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Yes, well, Maximilian came.”

  “Did he come to the hospital?”

  The giraffe stared at the walrus as if he were an idiot. The bartender brought over a large whiskey and soda, taking the empty glass with him.

  “No, not to the hospital. I met him a year ago. The hospital was when I was little, you know?” said Heine, sipping the fresh drink.

  “Of course.”

  “I don’
t know why he came to me in particular,” said Heine.

  “No. For that is a good question,” admitted Reuben.

  “But can I tell about what happened?”

  “That would be exciting.”

  Giraffe prepared himself by taking a large gulp of whiskey.

  “It was a dark night,” he said.

  “Tell it like it was,” asked Reuben.

  “It was dark, anyway,” said Heine morosely, “and I was on my way home, you know? And even if I’ve told this story at least a hundred times, I can’t remember where I’d been. But I was on my way home. And then there was a stabbing pain, you know? Like it usually is. A stabbing pain in the abdomen, hurt like hell.”

  Giraffe pointed with his hoof toward his abdomen to make clear exactly where the pain had arisen. Reuben nodded.

  “I fell apart, like,” continued Heine. “But before I fell to the sidewalk, there was someone who caught me. A chaffinch.”

  “What did you say?”

  “A chaffinch helped me.”

  “Maximilian is a chaffinch?”

  Reuben was astonished.

  “No, no,” said Heine, “that’s his helper, you know? A chaffinch, his name is Adam, he caught me and helped me to a…store, or something. That was where I met him.”

  “A store?”

  “Or something,” repeated Heine irritably. “I don’t know. It was an entryway right nearby, you know? I think it was a store.”

  “Excuse me, I was just wondering.”

  “Do you want to hear, or what?”

  “I really want to hear,” answered Reuben.

  “We walked in there, I was completely doubled over, I was in so much pain, the chaffinch dragged me, like, across the threshold. It was completely dark, I couldn’t see more than outlines, you know? But there was a chair in the middle of the room, and there they sat me down. It hurt so much that I was whimpering, the attacks are different, this was one of the worst. The chaffinch stood beside me, he said nothing.”

  “And you just went along?” asked Reuben, frankly surprised. “A strange animal down here in Yok, who does not explain anything, takes you over his shoulders and you just follow along?”

  “When I’m in pain, you know,” explained Heine, “then it’s like everything else disappears, you know? What I’m telling you, that’s how I remembered it afterward. But just then…then it just hurt like holy hell. And I was sitting there on the chair in the middle of the room and wasn’t thinking about anything other than my belly, and then he spoke to me.”

  “What did he say?” asked Reuben.

  He surprised himself with the intensity of the question. Reuben realized that he really, really wanted to know what Maximilian had said.

  “The first thing he said,” said Heine, “was that I was not in pain.”

  “That you were not in pain?”

  “And you know, it was like I wasn’t in pain anymore, you know? At the same moment as he said it, it didn’t hurt anymore. And when I sat up on the chair—I’d been, like, halfway lying down before—then he said that I would never be in pain again. And I have never been in pain again. Never. I tested it. Once I ate two kilos of plums and drank a bottle of rum. I shit like a cow, but it didn’t hurt, you know? Then he said that I must never lose hope, and then I could go.”

  “Go?”

  “That’s all. I never saw them again, neither the chaffinch nor Maximilian.”

  “But…but how do you know that it was…Maximilian?”

  “No idea.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “That I don’t know. There are others who have said that it must have been Maximilian. He looked shady, and had some kind of coiled cap, you know?”

  “And how do you know the chaffinch’s name was Adam?”

  “Maximilian called him Adam. He said, ‘Adam, who have you brought with you?’”

  “And what did the chaffinch say?”

  “No idea. I was hurting like holy hell.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yep.”

  Giraffe drank up without immediately waving for a new glass.

  “But that was when it started,” he added. “With all you cuckoos who come and ask the same things all the time.”

  Philip Mouse was standing outside, waiting, but thankfully he demanded no immediate account of the conversation.

  They walked together through the random streets in south Yok en route to the avenue and a possible taxi. There was something that felt different, and not until Reuben had been able to walk silently and think about the matter a long while did it occur to him what it was.

  Hope.

  “Mr. Private Detective,” he said. “I have a new lead to give you.”

  She had never forgiven him. They didn’t talk about it; they had put it behind them. Fox von Duisburg was a stuffed animal who seldom dwelled on times that had passed. But where Reuben Walrus was concerned, she could not forgive, only try to forget. That was not to say that she didn’t feel for him now. In Fox’s opinion Reuben was a poor wretch for all time, and after the news about Drexler’s syndrome, she saw the panic shimmering in his round, black eyes of glass. He put on a good face, but was close to a breakdown. He had always been the weaker of the two of them.

  “Do you really have time for this?” she asked.

  Walrus had begged and pleaded to be allowed to go along and shop. It was absurd, considering that he had always despised going into stores. And it was even more absurd that he still loved her. Despite the fact that she dismissed his constant declarations of love with feigned severity, she knew that he was serious. In his way. And now, under these circumstances, she gave in. She let him go along.

  Reuben looked out through the window. Still no sign of clouds. He should be back at the rehearsals in the concert hall before the Afternoon Rain. At most it took half an hour to walk from Grand Divino. The orchestra had been at it for nine days now; soon half the time would have passed. He nodded.

  “I have time.”

  “Good,” said Fox, “there’s a jacket I would like your opinion on.”

  This was a lie. She did not care in the least what he would think of the jacket, and he knew that too. She set the money on the black tray where the check already was, and they got up at the same time. Lunch had consisted of a much-too-healthy shrimp salad, and she would be hungry again in an hour.

  At the Grand Divino department store there were two lunch restaurants, an exclusive variety with white linen tablecloths and an extensive à la carte menu on the street level, and a simpler café on the sixth floor. Fox preferred the café. Probably it was the ultimate form of snobbery: shopping at the city’s most exclusive department store and at the same time choosing the cheapest lunch alternative. Only a stuffed animal with a lot of money could afford to appear thrifty, at least in the circles in which Fox moved.

  She had cast covetous glances at the jacket in question for a whole week. It was too expensive and did not go with anything else in her wardrobe.

  “It’s a Carél av Turtiano,” she said.

  “That says nothing to me,” answered Reuben, shaking his head. “But it sounds expensive.”

  “Worse than you think.” She smiled.

  She led him through the department store down to the fourth floor, where Carél had a boutique with gloomy clothing deep within one of the most exclusive departments. Fox parked Reuben on a hard couch and went off to demand the attention of the clerks. It did not take long before she was standing before him dressed in the jacket. Opposite was a full-length mirror in which she critically regarded herself.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Nice,” he said neutrally.

  “Is it worth five thousand?” she asked.

  “Are you joking?”

  He was shocked.

  “But it suits me in some way,” she added, turning her back on him.

  “What does he think? The other male?” asked Reuben.

  He sounded so bitter that she
instinctively avoided meeting his gaze in the mirror.

  “It’s you who are the other male, fool,” she replied.

  “It’s not that way at all.”

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  “Not.”

  “Careful now,” she advised. “I have sympathy, but not an unlimited supply. He was there when I needed him.”

  “You need resistance,” he maintained condescendingly.

  “You’re the one who needs resistance. I need support.”

  “From someone you respect.”

  “You’re not going to talk your way out of this,” answered Fox in an attempt to jokingly redirect a conversation that she knew was heading in the wrong direction, seen from Reuben’s perspective. “Shall I take this one or the green one?”

  “Take the one you have on,” he advised.

  “But is it worth the money?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She sighed but ignored him, and both of them knew that she would buy the jacket.

  Reuben and Fox left Grand Divino a few minutes later by way of the exit toward Krönkenhagen. In her paw she was carrying a white paper bag that read “Carél,” with expensive strips of leather as a handle. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that he had stopped on the sidewalk.

  “I don’t know what I should do,” he said piteously.

  The clouds had gathered at the horizon, and animals passing by them on the narrow sidewalk hastened their steps. Fox waited. She knew him so well.

  “I don’t even have two weeks left,” he said.

  He said this as much to himself as to her. He remained standing, frozen stiff by the cruel sentence he had just pronounced. Fox observed him. When she was certain that he did not want to say anything more, she took a step forward. Endlessly careful, so that he would not recoil, she placed her arms around him and enclosed him in an embrace. He let her do this, as so many times before. She gave him her warmth, her confidence, and power. He needed her more than ever.

  They remained standing like that until an angry truck honked at a wobbly cyclist farther down the street. Reuben gave a start and again became aware of reality. The clouds were on their way in over the city; the philharmonic was surely back after lunch, ready to attack his unfinished symphony anew.