Tourquai (25 page)

Philip Mouse sat motionless, staring at his friend. He did not say a thing.

“What were you doing there? In my office?”

“You’re bluffing,” Mouse said at last. “You have no idea where I was yesterday evening.”

“Shit into hell, Philip,” the superintendent moaned. “Remember who you’re talking to.”

Bloodhound suddenly felt restless and stood up. He took a turn around an incomparably blossoming pink rhododendron, but Mouse remained sitting motionless on the couch.

“Bring out the head,” Bloodhound growled, sitting down again.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mouse replied.

“I can guarantee that I can . . . It doesn’t need to be more than a few years,” said Bloodhound. “Bring out the head, then we’ll sew it back on and suddenly we’re talking about malicious damage, not murder.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mouse repeated.

As soon as Larry Bloodhound showed up on the roof, Philip Mouse had lost all energy; it was as if his capacity to think and speak had been sucked out of him. But now at last he got up from the couch and pointed at the police officer with a sharp claw.

“You have nothing,” he said. “You have absolutely nothing. If you had anything, you wouldn’t have come yourself.”

“Philip, I—”

“Nothing,” Mouse repeated. “What kind of craziness is this? You coming here and suggesting . . . coming and maintaining that I . . . no, the hell you will.”

“Philip, there’s no way out of this. I know. This requires more than just—”

“Bullshit,” Mouse spit out. “Bullshit.”

And he turned his back on the superintendent, going with determined steps away toward the door that led down to the elevators. Bloodhound let him go. The private detective was right. There was no evidence. But that was only because Bloodhound hadn’t figured out how things hung together until this morning. Producing evidence was easier when you knew the answer to the riddle.

And Larry Bloodhound—who had been hopefully uncertain when he’d taken the elevator up through Tour de la Liberté—was now convinced.

7.5

N
o matter what time of day it was, the daylight never reached the corner next to the stove. That’s why it was there Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago would pray. The cramped space suited her religious temperament; it was as if she were standing in the corner for her faith.

She did not pray at fixed times, and she did not keep track, but she fell on her knees in the corner next to the stove at least four or five times every day. She performed these hours of prayer as a kind of meditation, letting her thoughts wander freely with a starting point in a text from the Proclamations. She would usually stick with the same text as long as she felt it engaged her, which might be for days or months.

Early in the morning on Sunday, the ninth of June, Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago woke up in her bed, filled with energy and desire. During the night, dreams had tormented her, and she longed for her place by the stove. Since early in May, she had repeated the same piece from the First Proclamation in her prayer. The rhythm and sound of the words calmed her, the text helped her ease the night’s anxiety.

She stumbled into the bathroom, pushing aside the piles of dirty laundry and heaps of old newspapers, and made her way to the toilet. Many years ago she had transformed the bathroom into a combination archive and closet. She did her business in the toilet, sometimes she stepped into the drying cabinet, but otherwise hygiene and cleanliness were not the sort of thing Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago was interested in. She hadn’t turned on the faucet for many years, and were she to make an attempt today, it was doubtful whether the pipes would function.

In the darkness in the bathroom she found a pair of underwear, a skirt, and a blouse. She dressed herself quickly in yesterday’s clothes. She neither laundered nor bought new clothes; she wasn’t vain, what she already had was just fine.

Out in the kitchen she made a fire in the stove with a couple of dry sticks of wood and set a saucepan with water on the large burner. Then she fell down on her knees in her customary corner. Half aloud, she mumbled the words of Noah Whale from the First Proclamation:

And Magnus heard the mighty sea, and understood its soul.

At water’s edge he felt the ocean cold intense.

He opened wide his mouth, for questions crave defense.

But it was not their fault, the seaweed and algae scold.

Horizon melded sky and sea together as a whole.

Through the water came a golden fish swimming toward
the strand,

a creature true, but one that could not thrive on land.

“A pitiful life,” said Magnus, “but nonetheless a soul.”

“He knows not where he is.” Magnus looked into its eye.

“He only recalls the now, and of that but a moment,

his reasoning is stunted, his spirit is in torment,

and to pray for him and for his life is pure futility.”

He spoke about Creation not as something to perfect;

he raised up the fish and cried, “Desire

that memory of the feeble-minded’s life not expire,

a life in harmony has nought to do with intellect.”

The more than three thousand verses in the First Proclamation followed the same patterns, simply rhymed and rhythmically wrought. After having mumbled four verses, Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago proceeded to wordlessly sing the rhythm and melody as a kind of mantra.

Before her mind’s eye one of her students appeared, the mournful Agnes Guinea Pig. Hummingbird was flooded with hatred, an unreasonable jealousy that stuck in her wings and cut in her chest.

The inward image became clearer. Hummingbird saw before her Agnes Guinea Pig standing by the easel out in the greenhouse. The building’s white paint was flaking, the beautiful glass roof had fallen apart in several places, and ivy and weeds had moved in and taken possession of the building. Agnes Guinea Pig—Hummingbird’s oldest pupil—stood in the midst of this green decay in a blue dress with white lace at the throat, as if she were younger than she was.

And Agnes took a step back to observe what she had achieved. She had spent six months in front of the same motif, and the last few weeks she had concentrated exclusively on the sky. Like all of Hummingbird’s pupils, Guinea Pig worked to become just as technically proficient as her teacher. To imitate, to the slightest detail, was to conquer. Esperanza-Santiago’s pupils ended every term by painting their own large, new canvases in the style of Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago. It was these paintings—if they were sufficiently good—that Hummingbird signed and sold via Jake Golden Retriever and Igor Panda.

For Agnes Guinea Pig, however, examination day was far off. Her sky looked like a sea, her mixing of color lacked feeling, her technique was stiff and obvious.

Esperanza-Santiago is on her
knees on the floor by the stove, praying. Before her she sees Agnes Guinea Pig, who observes her incomplete work, who squints and shuffles as if she were an artist, and who then exclaims, “I think I’m starting to understand.”

A mockery.

It was nothing other than a mockery. Agnes Guinea Pig had not understood. Nothing in what she had accomplished, in her facial expressions, in her lack of development, suggested that she had understood.

Hummingbird saw before her how she slowly went up to the pupil, placed herself behind her, took her paw, and together they again approached the canvas. With a careful but determined wing, Hummingbird led the guinea pig’s brush across what was supposed to depict a sky, and with all of her body the artist felt that Agnes Guinea Pig was, and remained, a lost cause.

Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago again experienced, in the corner next to the stove, all of the painful stages of jealousy.

To be Agnes Guinea Pig.

To be so free from talent, from compulsion, from self-insight. Hummingbird sank her forehead deeper down toward the floor. She was filled with feelings that were not only shameful, they were indefensible. From Magnus she had received a gift, a favor, and here she was, fantasizing about escaping it. To awake one morning without demands, without expectations, to live a day as spiritually empty as Agnes Guinea Pig. To get to experience what was talked about in the First Proclamation as “the feeble-minded’s fortune.”

Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago wept.

The tears were running down her cheeks, and she was overcome by shame.

“I’m weeping with happiness,” she called to her Lord, but realized that He would hardly let Himself be fooled.

She painted for His sake. He had given her the gift, she was in eternal debt to Him. And the money Jake Golden Retriever earned on the pupils’ paintings Esperanza-Santiago donated entirely to charity through the organization A Helping Hand. But however much she exerted herself, she could not free herself from this: the feeling of envy at stuffed animals like Agnes Guinea Pig, who lived without compulsion and without self-insight.

At last she calmed down. The spasms subsided, and her desperate prayers were transformed into quiet crying. Outside, the morning haze still lay heavy over her garden and greenhouse, and she had plenty of time.

A few hours later,
Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago parked a dark red Volga Minibus in the parking lot outside Boathouse 3. It was a rusty vehicle with dents on the front that belonged to the neighboring farmer.

The boathouse was silent and deserted. Hummingbird was early. There were thousands of places in Mollisan Town where she could have held her meetings with Jake Golden Retriever, but she had chosen this one. She liked the smell from the clear, cold Dondau, and the stillness of the river in the morning, when the surface of the water was smooth and mysterious.

Hummingbird went out on one of the piers and sat down on a bench. She knew how chaotic it had been here only a few hours ago. She knew how the dockworkers loaded and unloaded, swore and shouted, ran and carried as the captains worriedly glanced at the horizon to determine how little time they had and how mean they needed to be. And now: silence.

Hummingbird was lost in thought.

A few minutes later the silence was broken when the door to the boathouse opened with an ominous creaking. Hummingbird gave a start and got up. She immediately discovered that the figure walking up the wharf was not Jake Golden Retriever.

At about the same time Igor Panda recognized his artist.

He stopped. He turned pale, and the panic showed in his eyes.

“Hum—Hummingbird,” he stammered to himself.

In patrol car 767-600
sat three police officers, each eating a pineapple flambé. The car was more than twenty years old, the stuffing was poking out of the seats, and a little samba band was stuck to the instrument panel. It couldn’t be removed; they had tried for several years. The windows of the police car were fogging over from the hot fruit; empty, trampled plastic water bottles were on the floor, both front and back. The aroma of coconut and cinnamon inside the car was overwhelming, and the kangaroo behind the wheel complained as usual, “It would have been better if we’d eaten before we got in the car. I knew it would smell like this. I’ll just have to throw this uniform in the wash!”

“Stop whining,” answered a leopard from the backseat. “We all have households to run.”

“And there are worse smells,” said the beetle sitting next to the leopard. “Hell, when I come home and smell like coconut and pineapple, the cubs are always happy.”

“Listen, we’re tired of your cubs,” the leopard snapped. “We hear about your cubs from the minute we sit in the car until we get out of it. It’s starting to feel like they’re my cubs.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” the kangaroo complained to the leopard. “You have a washing machine. If you had to reserve the laundry room, you probably wouldn’t think this smell was so—”

“
Your
cubs?” said the beetle to the leopard. “Listen, watch yourself, Leopard. Badmouth my cubs again and you’ll have to ride in another car.”

“Promises are all you give me,” the leopard sighed.

The kangaroo, finishing first, opened the glove compartment and took out a roll of paper towels to clean up with. It was then he saw the black Volga Deluxe drive past.

“Listen up,” he said, pointing. “Wasn’t that the car they just put a search warrant out for?”

The beetle and the leopard turned around, but the windows were fogged over and they saw nothing.

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” the kangaroo maintained.

He started the car and made a U-turn to follow the black Volga.

“I’m sure,” he repeated. “I remember the registration number. It’s almost like mine. I have PK 444 JK7. Igor Panda’s car had PK 444 something else.”

“We have to call this in,” said the leopard in the backseat.

“This’ll be something to tell the cubs,” the beetle chuckled. “That it was Dad who arrested Igor Panda.”

Igor walked quickly over
to the bench and sat down, careful to accommodate the artist. He could not for his life understand what was going on. Where was the forger? Why was Hummingbird here? Had she uncovered everything?

“Well,” said Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago as Panda sat down. “Tell me, now, what are you doing here?”

She had known this moment would come, ever since she and Golden Retriever had started the collaboration. Sooner or later Panda would have to discover them; it had taken an unexpectedly long time.

“I . . .” Panda replied, desperately seeking a way to continue the sentence, “I . . . agreed to a meeting here. Now.”

“A meeting,” Hummingbird nodded encouragingly. “Good. A meeting. With whom?”

“With . . .” Panda began, “with . . . a dog.”

“With a dog,” Hummingbird repeated. “Good, a dog, then. I was supposed to meet a dog, too. Can it be the same dog?”

“A golden retriever?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Hummingbird answered. “Jake.”

Igor Panda tried feverishly to understand what was going on. If Jake Golden Retriever arranged a meeting with Hummingbird, must he have been planning to become Hummingbird’s dealer himself?

“Jake, yes, that’s right,” said Igor Panda.

Should I cut off her head?

The thought came to him without Igor Panda having been prepared for it. Yesterday he had taken a life only twenty-some yards from where he now sat. With a deceased hummingbird, the value of her paintings would increase dramatically. Which made it even more critical to find out who the forger was.

“But there doesn’t seem to be any Jake Golden Retriever here, does there?” said Hummingbird.

There was something that puzzled her. That Panda was here was one thing, but where was Jake? A significant reason that she had chosen him as an intermediary was his reliability. She had gotten to know him when he worked as a janitor at the College of Art, many years ago.

“No,” Panda agreed.

“And you can’t have been mistaken?” Hummingbird asked. “About the day? Or the time?”

“Maybe,” said Panda.

He could not let go of the thought he had just had. He squirmed in his seat. He hardly knew what he had said. From the well of memory the golden retriever’s eyes showed up, as they looked when he buried the dog’s head yesterday evening. Could he bury the hummingbird’s head in the same place? He saw before him the little beak sticking up from the loose soil. The image made him dizzy. He felt nauseous. He turned around. Did he hear the vipers creeping outside the walls of the boathouse? No, it must be his imagination. The weight of the money in his inside pocket made him nervous.