Amberville
Page 7
Conversation ceased and a few fresh bottles of vodka were taken out while everyone thought about the Chauffeurs. It was almost impossible to mention these messengers of death without darkening everyone’s mood. No animals were so feared as the Chauffeurs. Even if few had seen them, all were aware that they drove the red pickup through the town at night, in pursuit of their victims. They did what they had to do, and picked up those animals whose lives were over. But where were the animals taken, and what happened to them? Was there a heaven, a life after this one? Every time you saw a red pickup or thought about the Chauffeurs, your faith was tested. Was it strong enough to chase away your fears?
The stuffed animals sipped the vodka in silence. The alcohol had its effect, and the conversation became less structured. For another half hour or so they succeeded in keeping on the subject. Snake talked, the others listened. He attacked the problem from a series of different points of view and after considerable anguish came to the conclusion that it was more probable that the Death List existed, in some form, than that it did not.
The weather was approaching midnight. Sam left his guests in the kitchen and went into the bathroom where, in one of the hollow feet of the bathtub, he stored the green tablets he usually took along with alcohol, and which provided a dreamless sleep. When he returned, Eric and Tom-Tom were no longer responsible for what they were saying.
“Death takes us all,” exclaimed Eric gloomily.
“Lanceheim LOSERS,” Tom-Tom cried out. “They ought to be called Lanceheim LOSERS and not Lasers.”
He was talking about the district cricket team. No one paid him any attention.
“You were always a sports nut, sweetheart,” said Sam sentimentally. “You always liked sports. I remember one time…one time…no…no…I don’t remember.”
Tom-Tom broke out in violent laughter.
“There’s no way out,” Eric continued on his introverted track. “Sooner or later it ends. That’s all we know.”
“And can you turn sooner into later, that is the question,” Snake interjected.
“A question many of my customers would gladly have an answer to,” Sam smiled hazily.
“You fucking creep,” snapped Snake.
“Listen up now,” said Tom-Tom threateningly. “You can be damn creepy yourself.”
Sam looked gratefully at the crow.
“Death,” said Eric, “is perhaps the start of the next life?”
“There’s a story,” said Snake, “of how a name was once removed from the Death List. That must be the one Dove’s heard.”
“I don’t know what story you’re thinking of,” said the bear, who if he’d been more sober would have noticed that Snake Marek—in contrast to the others—didn’t seem especially drunk.
“The one about Prodeacon…what was his name…Prodeacon Poodle?”
“I seem to think that I’ve heard it,” said Sam.
“I’ve never heard it,” said Eric firmly.
“If it’s something frigging dirty, I don’t want to hear it,” said Tom-Tom, who feared it was time to tell dirty stories. The crow had always felt uncomfortable where dirty stories were concerned.
“Prodeacon Trew Poodle lived just under one hundred years ago—he was prodeacon down here in Yok, and the story is about his goodness,” said Snake. “The three prodeacons in Amberville, Tourquai, and Lanceheim saw Trew as their spiritual leader, despite the fact that he was considerably younger and not at all as experienced as they. One night Trew called the other prodeacons to him and told them the unbelievable: all four of them were on the Death List. In just a week they would be picked up by the red wagons that were used at that time.”
“I’ve heard this story,” mumbled Sam.
“Prodeacon Trew could not let this happen,” Snake continued relentlessly.
This was Snake’s best routine, a long, morally instructive story; he’d used the story about Prodeacon Trew Poodle as a starting point in several novels over the years; it could symbolize just about anything.
“With a frenzy that astonished his three colleagues,” said Snake, “the prodeacon fell on his knees before the altar and started to pray. He prayed for their lives, he prayed to Magnus to spare them, he implored Him to remove them from the list.”
“Now I know,” said Sam. “Now I remember this.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Tom-Tom hesitantly. “So it’s Magnus who writes the list?”
“Prodeacon Poodle prays and prays,” Snake continued without letting himself be distracted, “while the prodeacons from Tourquai, Lanceheim, and Amberville hurry back to their respective parishes and devote themselves to more practical details. Who should succeed them, who should inherit their possessions, who should write their obituaries.”
“Vanity,” interjected Eric, and added, mostly to himself: “Not the least bit important.”
“However that might be,” snorted Snake, “Prodeacon Poodle prays for a week at a time while the others are busy with worldly things, and the following Sunday they meet again in Sagrada Bastante. And while they are standing there, discussing practicalities, the doors of the church open and in come the Coachmen.”
“The Coachmen?” wondered Tom-Tom.
“The Chauffeurs of that time, sweetheart,” explained Sam.
“The Coachmen pick up the prodeacon from Amberville, the prodeacon from Lanceheim and the prodeacon from Tourquai,” continued Snake.
“And the point of the story is that Magnus doesn’t hear prayers?” said Eric with surprise.
“Prodeacon Trew Poodle was also on the list,” said Snake. “That was why he was praying for the others’ lives, so that all the city’s four prodeacons wouldn’t disappear at the same time. But thanks to his unselfish prayer, he was the one whose name was removed.”
“What the hell, couldn’t he save the others?” asked Tom-Tom.
“It is told,” said Snake, “that at that time only one animal could be removed from the list every fifth year.”
“At that time?”
Snake Marek would have shrugged his shoulders if he’d had any.
“It’s a morally instructive story, not historical truth.”
Snake fell silent and sipped his vodka without drinking it.
“Let’s hope that this is the fifth year, darling,” whispered Sam to Eric.
Sam finally went and lay down. Tom-Tom moved over to the couch, taking with him a giant bag of cheese doodles.
Eric remained at the kitchen table, gloomily collapsed with a mug of vodka in his paws and with his thoughts far back in time. The memory of the years at Casino Monokowski were usually pleasant, but now the usual feeling refused to make an appearance. Instead of being happy at seeing his old companions again, he felt downhearted.
“I think the crow is right,” hissed Snake in his ear.
Eric winced. Snake was standing on the kitchen counter, right behind him.
“The Chauffeurs don’t drive around at random,” Snake continued. “It’s completely obvious, of course, but it takes a stupid crow to put it into words. Our best possibility to get on the trail of the list is through the Chauffeurs.”
Eric got up from the kitchen table, realized that he could hardly stand straight, and infinitely slowly and carefully he went over to the balcony door. Cold air, he thought, was what he needed in order to think clearly. Snake followed behind. Out on the balcony Eric noted that the breeze had not yet died down. He had thought that dawn was quite near. The chill worked its way into his fur and there was a faint odor of bacon in the air.
“There’s something to that,” said Eric after taking a few deep breaths. “We have to find the Chauffeurs. If there’s a list, someone must deliver it to them.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Snake.
“That’s why I asked you to come along,” said Eric. “To think. How do we go about this?”
“There are not an infinite number of ways to go about this.”
“I have a tougher nut t
o crack,” Eric added. “A problem worthy of you, I believe.”
They stood a while in the moonlight, looking into the lighted but deplorable apartments on the opposite side of the courtyard. Neither of them had mentioned a word about the letter Eric had written in his mother’s name and which had forced Snake to Yiala’s Arch.
“Let’s hear it,” said Snake without enthusiasm.
“Let us say,” said Eric, “that there was not only a reward offered if we succeed. Let us say that there is a punishment as well if we don’t succeed.”
Eric fell silent. Snake said nothing; the hypothesis spoke for itself.
“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.”
TWILIGHT, 2
He 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.
CHAPTER 8
Sam 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. M
ollisan 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?