Lanceheim (24 page)

“I didn't think she did badly at all, Reuben,” began Shetland Pony McCain.

Reuben had not said that Josephine was his daughter, but it was of course a vain hope that he could keep it secret. He sighed.

“I don't know,” he said. “There was something mechanical about her playing. Perhaps not so much in the touch as in the phrasing?”

“I think you're judging too strictly now, Reuben,” objected Daniel Poodle.

“What'd you say?”

“You don't have to be so strict,” repeated Poodle.

“I am afraid that you will be overly kind,” countered Reuben. “She is my daughter, but the tuba is her idea, and she must build her career on her own merits. This becomes that much more important, because not only the outside world is going to suspect that she got into the academy thanks to me, but she as well. There will always be a seed of uncertainty. It's really important that she knows she's capable.”

The jury sat silently, considering this.

“I think,” said the Shetland Pony, “that this must be your decision, Reuben. No one else will feel comfortable deciding Josephine's fate. You make the decision, and we will back you up, whatever you decide.”

“McCain is right,” agreed Poodle. “That's how it must be.”

“Then…,” said Reuben Walrus, drawing out the words, “then…Josephine will just have to accept being kept out this time.”

There was dead silence around the table.

W
ould you like another beer?” asked Mary-Jo Antelope.

I nodded. The sound level in the restaurant was so high that there was no point in trying to say anything when you could nod. Mary-Jo forced her way over to the bar, and she would be coming back sooner than most; personally, I would probably never have even managed to force my way up to the counter. Two times a week the foremost of Mollisan Town's so-called Discontented Singers appeared at Veronica's in Tourquai, but I had never been there before. The Discontented Singers were artists who, equipped with a guitar or an accordion or sitting at the piano, performed simple songs with complicated—and long—lyrics. Often the point was aimed at our mayor, Sara Lion, but of course all kinds of authority needed to be criticized. I cannot say that I thought what I heard was either especially good or bad; I am not a musical stuffed animal.

Mary-Jo Antelope had been in my life a few months, and I was deeply impressed by her sincerity and patience. Usually I remained unaffected—if I may express myself carelessly—by the splashing of bleeding hearts, my own
included, but my experiences with Missy Starling had left certain traces. Anyone could have figured out that of course Missy would leave me for another, but when it happened at last I was nonetheless unprepared. This contributed to my being crushed.

Even six months later I was not prepared to move in with a new female, my nerves being to some extent still in disarray. Mary-Jo, however, demanded nothing of the sort. She was comfortably unaffected, with all her hooves on the ground. With Mary-Jo there was no calculation or dissimulation, only a straightforward manner that possibly might get a little…boring…in the long run. For me, however, this was both unusual and refreshing.

Neither of us had room to move in with the other. Missy Starling found a way to buy me out. I was staying temporarily in the guestroom at the home of my childhood friend Weasel Tukovsky, who had unexpectedly become the advice columnist at the
Daily News
and was making a good living at that.

Mary-Jo understood that I needed time and care, and that was partly why she dragged me along to Veronica's—a little distraction from an existence that consisted of duties to Adam and Maria and their Retinues, as well as my gloominess at all the lies that Missy Starling had left behind her.

I was looking preoccupied toward the stage while I waited for my antelope and the beers. A snake was performing; his voice was nasal, and the tip of his tail was strangely involved in the performance, simultaneously a conductor's baton and a drumstick that rhythmically beat the tambourine on the chair beside him. Some sort of insect accompanied him on the piano, but I only heard fragments of the text itself. The audience closest to the stage was polite and listened quietly, but the farther into the place you went, the higher
the volume of conversation was. At the bar I am sure that no one cared about the snake's intense song.

“Let's sit down,” called Mary-Jo when she came with our glasses, and we made our way to a little table that was vacant.

With Missy Starling every silence had been a threat, an insult of some kind, if the silence was not a “stage pause” on her terms. With Mary-Jo it was different. We could sit there at our table and drink a little beer and listen a little to the snake on the stage without having it feel uncomfortable in any way. A quarter of an hour passed, twenty minutes, and I do not know if I even thought about the fact that a new Discontented Singer had taken the stage before I gave a frightened start at hearing a sudden hissing in my ear.

“Uh…I'd like to talk a little, is that…mm…okay?”

The snake who had recently been onstage had slithered up along the back of the chair beside me, and his eyes were only centimeters from mine when I turned around.

Of course he did not wait for my answer. He glided down the table without letting me out of his sight for a moment. This meant that he carelessly turned his tail toward Mary-Jo Antelope. Like me, she recognized him from the stage, and perhaps she was impressed that I kept such a low profile. Judging by this, I must know a Discontented Singer.

But I wasn't the one who knew the snake; he was the one who knew me.

“You are…uh…Diaz, right?”

I nodded.

Up to that day I had not had any snake friends, and therefore I did not know how I should behave. Should I lean forward and talk with him, or should I simply raise my voice? Even if there were no animals right next to our table, another Discontented Singer was making considerable noise through the speakers.

“Super-sorry to intrude…mm…huh?” said Dennis. “But I know that you…uh…work with…mm…Maximilian.”

After the police effort against the cinema—and despite the fact that a few years had passed since then—my conspiracy theories had gotten extra nourishment, and I was extremely suspicious of questions of this type. Therefore I neither confirmed nor denied the snake's assertion.

“I, uh, am his friend, huh?” Dennis Coral announced solemnly, but corrected himself immediately. “He is my Savior.”

I was forced to agree.

“He is the Savior of us all,” I replied.

“And I know who, mm, you are. You're the Recorder, huh?”

I felt both disturbed and flattered. He must have seen it in my eyes, for he quickly added, “It's, uh, Maximilian himself who told me that, huh? He told me about the Recorder Diaz.”

“You've met Maximilian?” I asked with surprise.

The snake nodded. “In the slammer,” he said.

I took a breath. Since they had locked Maximilian up in solitary confinement, I had hardly gotten any information at all. Here in the flesh before me was an ex-convict with his own account of Maximilian's experience in jail. The surroundings suddenly became intrusive and unworthy. No one there—the drunks over at the bar, the singer on the stage, not even Mary-Jo Antelope—fit into this solemn context. I got up.

“Mary-Jo,” I said. “I have to go. I'll call you later and explain.”

And it was her strength of character to accept my action with a noble calm. She nodded, raising her beer mug in an undramatic farewell, but the snake and I were already on our way out.

 

We found nowhere else
to go, so for a few hours we strolled around Tourquai's empty, broad sidewalks from which the massive skyscrapers grew up, concealing the night sky. He had a mission, but I was still the one who got the most out of our walk, I think. Dennis told me everything he knew about Maximilian's time in prison, and concluded by recounting their spectacular flight. For someone else this might have been unbelievable, but not for me.

In Dennis Coral's eyes, Maximilian represented unshakable hope. Dennis had had time to think about the matter since he had slipped out of King's Cross, and this was what he had arrived at: Maximilian had shown that the impossible was possible, that however dark the future might appear, hope—naive and ridiculous, of course, but at the same time heartening in a fundamental way—must be kept alive. Dennis had lived a life without hope, but that would not be repeated. That was Maximilian's teaching. Never let hope die.

Dennis revealed what Maximilian had said when they left the prison.

“If you set an arrow to your bow, uh, you can still only shoot it as far as the eye can see through force and will. That's what he said, huh?”

“And?” I asked. “What more did he say?”

“Nothing more.” Dennis smiled.

“But what does it mean?” I asked.

“I, um, thought about it a long time,” Dennis admitted. “And I think he meant that if you want to shoot the arrow even farther, you have to dare to hope. Thus it is, uh, only in the great idea that you can take yourself anywhere, uh, that we are limited by our reality, and that it, mm, isn't always enough?”

Dennis continued his explanation, and I cannot say that
I understood everything exactly, but one thing was sure: He spoke with an infectious fervor.

“That's what I am, uh, singing about, huh?” he said. “But I think I'm, uh, through singing at Veronica's. I want to be with you all instead, huh?”

“With us?”

I remember the moment. We were standing outside a shop that sold expensive watches. We were by a street with six lanes, ten or so traffic lights, but not a car. It had started to get light, and my legs suddenly felt tired. I had carried the snake on my arm most of the way, because it was easiest to talk that way.

“Mm, with you all, huh?” he said. “I've heard about, mm, your Retinues. I'm the one you've been waiting for, huh? Do you get it?”

“Well, I—”

“Faith, hope, and love, like.”

“Indeed. Yes, I—”

“If Chaffinch talks about faith, if Mink talks about love—mm, I have actually been at one of, uh, her lectures. Then I'm left, huh? The voice of hope.”

We got no further that evening than me promising to introduce him to Adam Chaffinch, but I tried to offer as little encouragement as I could. That a Discontented Singer would have one of Maximilian's Retinues was not an idea I especially liked.

 

Naturally I could not
sleep that night. The encounter with Coral had been overwhelming. I had been given a view into Maximilian's life in prison that shook me, and the idea of Dennis Coral as the third apostle gave me no rest.

A month earlier Adam Chaffinch had more or less gone to pieces. I had talked a good deal with Maria Mink about this, because I had expected it to happen. Adam was run
ning himself into the ground; he was working too hard, and he disregarded my warnings. After he became ill and was in bed with a high fever for four weeks, I humbly presented the idea that he ought to ramp down.

He took too much on himself, I said. The need among stuffed animals was great, of that there was no doubt, but if he could find another who could speak to those in need? That was exactly what I said, and now Coral showed up.

Adam had not immediately dismissed the idea, but I could not be more specific than that. Besides, medicine should be taken in small doses.

I am not a stuffed animal who wants to promote myself in an unjust manner, but there is no reason for feigned humility either. The first meetings between Coral and Chaffinch did not go well—they did not go well at all. Chaffinch was, and is, a stern and serious bird who, despite everything had a number of unshakable ideas about right and wrong. Dennis Coral—this homosexual jailbird who had escaped from King's Cross, appeared as a Discontented Singer, and spoke in a manner that was difficult to imagine in connection with the word of Magnus—did not fit into Chaffinch's templates. It took time before Adam gave in—which to his credit he never regretted—and I definitely had something to do with it.

D
uck Johnson heard the bolts in the great vault door and realized what was about to happen. They must have set off an alarm, as he expected; in reality the question had always been how much time they would have.

Now that time had run out.

Duck increased his pace. He had been working on one of the pallets of bills farther inside the vault, and what he did now had been his alternative plan the whole time, something to try if everything else went wrong. He emptied the pallet of bundles of bills so that a deep hollow space was formed. Just as the police opened the vault, Duck pressed himself down into the little grotto, and from there he could hear everything that happened.

When they took Maximilian, Duck did not dare breathe. But he did not dare move later either, when the darkness and silence almost suffocated him, for fear that there were heat or motion detectors in the vault.

The next morning they came early and loaded the pallets. They used a small truck that drove between the vault
and the securities transport that was waiting by the bank's underground loading dock. No one saw Duck or his hiding place in the fifth pallet of bills; no one looked.

On board the truck, he had plenty of time to prepare himself. He knew that they were on their way to the Hole at the Garbage Dump, and he knew that his only chance to get away was when the back of the truck opened and dumping began. Even if the guard who was driving the truck were to see him running away, there was no reasonable connection between the National Bank, the transport, and a duck running at the Garbage Dump.

The duck crept out of the bills, no longer even thinking about the stench, and at the moment the truckbed began to tip and open, Duck squeezed out on the side and ran away faster than he had ever run.

Duck hid in an overturned bathtub a short distance from the Hole, and there he waited until it got dark. He had heard the stories about the Garbage Dump and the psychopathic overseer named Bataille, and he did not intend to stay longer than he had to.

When night came, he snuck away, following one of the broad roads through the refuse toward the exit, and then continued along Eastern Avenue for a few kilometers. After that he turned south, to Yok, where his aunt had an overnight apartment that she never used. It was on mold green rue d'Uzés, and for many years Duck had had a key to it without his aunt knowing about it.

 

From the beginning his
strategy had been to lie low a while and keep out of the way. But after a week, Duck was completely paranoid. He imagined that animals were looking at him when he went shopping, and he seemed to recognize an otter who went past his doorway every morning from the
Seminars on Faith, Hope, and Love. It was a bad spiral: The more time he spent inside his aunt's apartment, the less he dared go out.

Just over a year later, still tormented by his persecution complex, Duck Johnson booked time with an unscrupulous plastic surgeon who had his practice in a former garage two blocks from rue d'Uzés. Duck had to pay for the operation on credit, but nothing in life was free. The plastic surgeon executed a beak exchange and a neck lengthening that meant that when Duck left the place, he could call himself Sam Goose. This granted him a certain respect, but only a few days later the plastic surgeon, who now had a perfect hold on Duck, called and demanded payback—everything from stealing prosthetics from the city hospitals to collecting money from delinquent former patients.

Duck carried out these unpaid assignments for four years, until one morning, the Chauffeurs fetched the plastic surgeon. It was a relief, but also left a vacuum in his life. That he did not feel any great happiness when the blackmail ceased awakened a further existential emptiness in Duck's soul. The sudden idleness brought with it fundamental questions about who he really was and what his purpose was in Mollisan Town, and inconsolable brooding led to a long, deep depression.

One morning a few months later, Duck's aunt found him under the bed in the apartment in Yok in a pose for healing meditation that caused his eyes to roll back in his skull while he hyperventilated. She forced him to seek professional help immediately. It could not go on like this.

The therapist must have rubbed his hands: On the couch lay a real challenge. After a few weeks of treatment, he convinced Duck Johnson to try to write out his anxiety.

“Confess,” said the therapist, “get your inhibitions and secrets out. Unscrew the lid. You've kept your misdeeds secret so long that they are eating you up from inside.”

But at this point Duck Johnson was too complicated a stuffed animal for this simple advice. Simply buying himself a notebook and a pen and starting to write was not enough for him. True, he bought the notebook and pen, but he also bought a large pocketknife and—when he passed by a lumberyard on his way home—a couple of good-sized pieces of wood. After this, a period in Duck's life began that was marked by manic activity. The door to the apartment on rue d'Uzés remained locked, and his aunt's key no longer worked.

Time passed, and Duck's aunt became more and more worried about her nephew. She made it a habit to go past the apartment a few times each day, and soon lost count of how many weeks and months this went on. She knocked on the door, opened the mail slot, and called his name, but except for an increasingly rotten stench, there were no signs of life.

When the door was suddenly thrown open one day in March, the aunt took a few astonished steps backward. The duck—transformed to a goose—who came out of the apartment reminded her only vaguely of the nephew she had once had. He was a wreck, he did not seem to recognize her, and with a cry of pain and sorrow she saw him stagger down the steps, never again to return.

Where he disappeared to, as far as I understand, no one yet knows.

Hesitantly Duck's aunt went into the apartment—it was hers, after all—to find, on the spice rack above the stove, twenty-three small but carefully carved globes lined up next to each other. They were no larger than the spice jars beside them. She took one of them down, twisting and turning it in the daylight that fell through the window. It depicted a planet: All the globes depicted planets, in what was possibly an alternate universe. Duck had carved entire miniature worlds, with contours of continents, mountain ranges, and
seas in beautiful patterns. The traces of his work were everywhere; wood chips and sawdust lay like a film over bed and floor.

Duck's aunt weighed the globe in her paw with admiration. This was a remarkable thing that her nephew had achieved; would it be possible perhaps to make a buck from his unknown talent? By the end of that same week the aunt had received offers from three different art galleries in Lanceheim. Without batting an eye, she then sold the globes to the highest bidder. She got seven thousand, and would thereafter always remember her nephew with warmth.

What neither the art dealer nor Duck's aunt knew was that inside each and every one of the twenty-three planets was a handwritten confession of the twenty-three sins Duck counted as his worst. On the other hand, the art dealer would not have cared; he knew he had a bargain. His prosperous clientele was made up of collectors whose taste he knew well, and by the following week he had already sold two of the planets at impressive prices.

On Thursday evening, when his poker-playing friends had gathered in the gallery right before the Evening Storm, the art dealer cockily displayed his treasures. It was thereby natural that when, with a full house in his hand during the last deal long after midnight, he raised Judge Hawk Pius—the table's leading bluffer—and took one of the planets down from the shelf and put it in the pot.

Judge Pius was holding a straight. He smiled his cunning smile, put the planet in his pocket and the money in his wallet, and went home shortly thereafter as the biggest winner of the evening. Tomorrow would be a good day in Pius's court, but something even more astounding was to happen.

The judge always slept uneasily, and this short night was no exception. He had set his trophy on the night table, and woke up when, in his sleep, his wing happened to strike
his newly won planet, knocking it to the ground. With a distinct crash it split in two, and from inside fell Duck Johnson's confession.

 

Hawk Pius was one
of the strictest judges in Mollisan Town, but he had always prided himself on being just. The morning he read Duck Johnson's confession of how he had lured Maximilian to the break-in at the National Bank, it took him less than a few hours to decree what Maximilian's sentence should have been, provided that the whole truth had been known at the time of the trial. By then Maximilian had been at King's Cross for nine years and ten months, and the last four months he had been in solitary. Regardless of the fact that Maximilian's punishment had been increased over time due to complicity to flight—something Judge Pius felt was questionable in any event when he read the account of the circumstances—the prisoner had more than paid for the crime he had committed against the state. Pius and his animal officials filled out the required forms, stamped and sent the certified letters that were demanded, and when the red tape was done, a date for Maximilian's release was agreed on: Thursday the twenty-seventh of December. On that day Maximilian would have been deprived of freedom for nine years, eleven months, and three days.

The decision didn't raise any eyebrows among the prison administration. True, it was good to be rid of the troublesome prisoner—he made use of valuable resources—but in general the prison had no opinions on the work of the courts.

In accordance with procedure, the prison administrators sent a concise memorandum to the Police Authority and Ministry of Finance. This was done before every release: It was a matter of seeing to it that the individual in question returned to society's customary orbit, not least in terms of tax registration.

The next day, when the Ministry of Finance databases had been updated by cross-tabulation against the registries of the other departments, Maximilian's name also showed up at the Ministry of Culture. An unpaid student loan meant that the Ministry of Culture was automatically informed of the release, so that they could once again demand the long-outstanding payment.

As chance would have it, Maximilian's name was not unknown to the official who administered this procedure. This official, an insignificant individual in our context—I have never even cared to search out his correct name—put in motion a series of conversations at the ministry. By late afternoon the information had made it all the way up to Vincent Tortoise.

 

Vincent Tortoise, head of
the Ministry of Culture, sat in a swivel-type leather armchair at the end of the table. In front of him were piles and bundles of papers, in envelopes and plastic folders, handwritten or typed, all asking for his attention. The sun was shining through the windows, the clouds had just dispersed after the Afternoon Rain, and the polished surface of the black walnut table sparkled with satisfaction.

Armand Owl was sitting on one of the chairs on the long side of the conference table. Only the two of them were in the room. Owl's back was straight, the knot of his tie small and hard, and he had hung his jacket over the back of the leather armchair so that it wouldn't wrinkle. His short beak opened only when required, and this was the case now.

“Bullshit!” he said.

“I am still not certain that this is even a bad thing,” Tortoise continued sarcastically. “I don't suppose you could say that you've managed to keep a lid on things as long as he's been in prison?”

“That is certified bullshit,” repeated Owl. “What we see now is only a whisper of what would have been the case if we had remained passive.”

“Whisper…or hissing,” answered Tortoise. “Or growling?”

“Whatever…” Armand sighed. “Whatever—”

“In any event, he is being released on the twenty-seventh. There is not much we can do about that. What do you propose?”

“They have already started planning,” said Armand Owl, worriedly wrinkling his eyebrows. “Chaffinch and the others. They intend some type of public demonstration.”

“We don't want that,” declared Tortoise.

“No, we don't. So my specific proposal is—and I have already talked with all the parties—that we release him two days earlier.”

Tortoise nodded, thought about the matter awhile, and smiled when he understood.

“Cancel their party?”

Owl nodded.

“And you haven't…,” Tortoise began with a familiar worry in his voice.

“There are no connections to the Ministry of Culture,” Owl hurried to assure him. “I have a few…friends…who owe me some favors. This is not a big deal, if we don't make it a big deal. He'll be released two days earlier, it's no more than that.”

“Good,” said Tortoise.

He picked up some papers that were in a bundle to the right and set them aside to the left, to indicate that the matter was finished.

 

(I realize now that
the attentive reader will not be content without an explanation of how it came to be that Dennis
Coral could join our group and start a Retinue without the police authorities arresting him. From a legal perspective he had without a doubt escaped from King's Cross, and he had a long prison sentence still to serve. My original idea was to remain somewhat unclear about what happened after the “escape,” but of course that generates more questions. The explanation is not complicated. When he was growing up, and as a prisoner at King's Cross, Dennis Coral had a different name. He was a different type of snake as well. The red, yellow, and black bands that I described previously he still wears today. The embroidery was Adam's idea, and afterward there was no doubt: Dennis had been transformed into a coral snake. That's the story, and more than that I do not, for understandable reasons, intend to tell.)