Tourquai (24 page)

“I’m so tired of this nagging,” she hissed into the phone. “You have to stop it. This is not destiny, it’s me.”

The self-assured Philip Mouse felt miserable. He sat in the armchair in his living room without turning on any lamps.

“But there is no better word,” he defended himself. “It’s not Magnus. I don’t believe in paradise, or in the underworld. When we’re used up, then that’s that. It doesn’t need to be so terrifying. If it’s over, then it’s over.”

“I’ve never believed in heaven,” she said. “But I don’t believe in anything else, either. There is nothing to blame. We have the responsibility. If all goes to hell, it’s only our own fault.”

“I agree,” he said.

“You don’t at all. That’s exactly what you don’t do. You believe in a context, a destiny, something bigger than yourself, something bigger than your life.”

He could hear that she was standing up. Probably in the kitchen, where there was a telephone next to the refrigerator. She sounded restless.

“But of course there’s something that—”

“And that’s just cowardice,” she spit out. “You take responsibility for your actions. It’s only you, no one else, who decides what you should say, what you should do.”

“I agree,” he repeated. “I’m responsible. But I have my assumptions, my limitations. You know? You’re the first to say how hopelessly romantic I am. That I always have been. Yes, but that’s how I was delivered, and no one taught me anything else. I’m not making excuses. And why should I? That’s what I mean by fate. I can’t be something I’m not.”

“But that’s just bullshit,” she interrupted. “Excuses. You have to take responsibility for your actions, Philip. Then you can be as ‘romantic’ as you want.”

“I’m
taking
responsibility. It’s not that. It’s just that the factory made me a certain way, with a certain ability, and I grew up in an environment that marked me, then and forever,” he continued, eager to make himself understood. “It’s everything around me, too. You. This city. Whether I want to be or not, I’m part of a system, a collective. And we’re all dependent on each other. When I turn a street corner, someone else goes in through a door. So we don’t meet. If we had run into each other, both of our lives would have been changed. Maybe.”

“And?”

“And . . . you don’t need to call that ‘fate.’ You can call it what you want. I’m carrying my own assumptions around, and they collide with someone else’s assumptions. Yours, for example. And together we create something new, we react to one another, and release an infinite sequence of reactions . . . which are not chance.”

“Philip,” said Jasmine into the phone, “I’m in kind of a rush, and I’m just on my way out . . . You can call it what you want, but the responsibility for your life is your own.”

“I’m taking responsibility,” he answered. “But I couldn’t act in any other way.”

He did not remember how they concluded the conversation.

7.4

S
uperintendent Larry Bloodhound was walking east on rue de Cadix. Perhaps he was catching a cold? A splitting headache was lurking right behind his right temple. Maybe it was just the detox? After stepping on the scale this morning, he realized it would never happen without the cocaine; he had gained a pound in just two days. He had taken out the equipment and found enough powder to be able to skip lunch and the cake with coffee. This was a defeat, of course, but Larry had decided to find someone besides Siamese to buy from. If nothing else, that was the lesson Anna had taught him.

At the corner of burgundy red rue des Écoles, an alarm vehicle caught up with the superintendent. Buck had called out all patrol cars and unmarked vehicles from rue de Cadix; sirens and screeching tires caused the stuffed animals on the sidewalks to turn and inquisitively watch this armada of power seep out across the streets of Tourquai. Bloodhound was certain that the citywide alarm had already gone out. With an effort of this level, it was only a matter of hours before Panda was brought in.

But Panda was not the guilty one.

Before Bloodhound managed to cross the street, an unmarked police car pulled up to the sidewalk with screeching tires and the front door on the passenger side was thrown open.

“Superintendent!” Anna Lynx called. “They’ve caught sight of the panda. He’s driving south along the Dondau. Hop in and come along! We’ll catch up with him before Haspelgasse.”

But the superintendent shook his head so that his long ears started swinging.

“Just make sure Buck makes a big deal out of it,” he growled, smiling shrewdly.

“Big deal of what?”

“Of arresting Panda.”

The superintendent closed the car door. Falcon was sitting behind the wheel and accelerated. He did not want to miss out on the resolution of the drama at any price.

After twenty minutes Bloodhound
had walked off the worst of his anger, and he hailed a taxi. He was still in Tourquai, but no more than a few minutes from North Avenue. The walk had been needed. What he had to do now was difficult enough as it was; he needed to put the irritation behind him.

The taxi reeked of garlic, but without thinking about food, Larry asked the driver to take him to baby blue Knackstrasse in Lanceheim, where private detective Philip Mouse’s office had been for many years. Bloodhound had been there once before; all he remembered was the decrepit wooden ceiling fan.

He sank back in the backseat of the taxi, observing the clear blue sky through a darkening film that the taxi’s owner had taped to the windows, and going through the evidence in his head. He could not know for certain, of course; you never did.

When had the suspicion first entered his mind? It was something Mouse had said, that Larry had committed to memory but not thought about very much.

It had been last Monday after work, when he went down to Chez Jacques after having discovered Vulture’s body up at Nova Park in the morning. It was completely natural that Philip Mouse had already heard about Vulture and the investigation that had been started; the private detective knew about most things going on in the police station on rue de Cadix. And when Mouse made his comment about heirs that needed money, it had seemed reasonable. General. There were always heirs, and who didn’t need money? It was only this morning, with the picture of Igor Panda in his paw, that the superintendent remembered Mouse’s words. Had the private detective known about Panda already last Monday?

It could be chance.

But that wasn’t likely.

“It’s here,” he said
to the driver. “The green door, number 34.”

The taxi stopped. Bloodhound paid and waited for the receipt, which he crumpled up and put in his jacket pocket. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and breathed in the air of Lanceheim: dusty cement, diesel fuel, and a tinge of metal, probably something the air was carrying from the cold springwater flowing in the Dondau. Yet another reason never to move from Tourquai, the superintendent thought.

The outside door was open, and Bloodhound took the elevator the three floors up to Philip Mouse’s office. He knocked on the door, and after a few moments, Daisy Hippopotamus opened. She recognized him immediately.

“Superintendent Bloodhound,” she said. “But . . . he’s not here.”

“Mouse? He’s not?”

“He hasn’t been here since yesterday evening. I called him this morning, but he didn’t answer.”

She was dressed in a red sweater that flattered her buxom figure, and Bloodhound seemed to hear a measure of worry in her voice.

“If he shows up,” said Bloodhound, “say that I was here looking for him. Ask him to call me.”

“I’ll do that,” Daisy promised. “I’m sorry, Superintendent.”

“Well,” Bloodhound growled, “it was just a long shot. We hadn’t arranged anything . . .”

Bloodhound left the private
detective’s office with unfinished business, but he had an idea. Over the years the two of them, the dog and the mouse, had, intentionally and unintentionally, revealed quite a bit to each other. Now the superintendent recalled that Mouse sometimes talked about a place where he went when he needed quiet and solitude. It was worth a try, thought Bloodhound; only Buck’s circus waited for him at rue de Cadix.

It was Lynx who had said it: that the tipster, the one who phoned in the tip about Vulture that first day, must have been someone familiar with the police and the police station. Anna had drawn her conclusion because the tipster obviously wanted Bloodhound in particular at the scene of the crime, and calling Falcon was a way to lure his superintendent there.

Well, Bloodhound thought, Lynx was right. But he ought to have realized it himself. When the telephone jangled on the desk last Monday morning and his instinct had been not to pick up, it was because someone was calling his direct extension. He thought it was his mother calling, and he didn’t have the energy for another guilt trip. The direct extension was not in any directory; only colleagues and his mother had it. He had been surprised at getting a “tipster” on the line; “tipsters” called in through the switchboard, even if they were often transferred. Why didn’t he remember that before Lynx pointed it out this morning?

Because it had not seemed significant.

And the reason the tipster wanted Larry in particular to take on the case? The answer was simple. If the tipster was also the murderer, and had a close relationship to the investigating superintendent, he ensured getting himself a view into the investigation process. He could influence the investigation in the direction he found suitable, if that was necessary. Like when the tipster sneaked into Larry’s office yesterday evening and placed the picture of Igor Panda on the desk.

Tour de la Liberté
was one of the first skyscrapers built in what came to be Tourquai’s city center, a forty-story-high cylinder-shaped construction sheathed in light, seamless marble. Around the tower, but at a respectful distance, one skyscraper after another shot up out of the asphalt. In later years the buildings became more and more spectacular, and together they finally formed the financial center of glittering shafts of prosperity that was Tourquai today. But through the years, Tour de la Liberté retained its dignity—an eternally modern work of architecture in an environment striving for effect.

After some mucking about in the lobby, Larry Bloodhound was able to get into the beautiful skyscraper’s elevator and push the topmost button, the fortieth floor. The elevator was dark and gloomy; it creaked and complained. It was a slow ride up through the round body of the building, and Bloodhound had time to sigh once or twice. Over the years he had learned to keep reality at a distance. At work, sooner or later the greed of stuffed animals, their envy and madness, became unbearable to observe. Then distance was all-important. Together with Philip Mouse, he had always been able to reduce the oddities to patterns and archetypes. That was what the relationship between them was about. They reminded each other that not everyone was crazy, and that had made them the best of friends.

During the elevator ride Bloodhound mentally took a few steps back from the table near the window at Chez Jacques and without illusions observed the two figures who were sitting there. The one in good faith, the other with an insidious purpose.

There was nothing that hurt more than being betrayed by someone who was so close.

The elevator doors opened, and the superintendent went up the short stairway to the roof, opened an old sheet-metal door, and stepped out under the sky.

On the roof a
running track in the form of a figure eight had been set up. The stuffed animals working in the tower could go up at lunch or after work and do a few laps. The narrow track was edged by tall Plexiglas, and running up there was dizzying, the view magnificent.

In the two “eyes” of the track the building manager at Tour de la Liberté had set up two oases: minimalistic but astoundingly magnificent gardens, explosions of green, red, and pink surrounding each elaborately carved piece of garden furniture. The view to the west hinted at the blue sea as a distinct line between sky and earth, the view east offered the urban jungle.

Mouse had confessed to Bloodhound that he sometimes made his way to this exclusive yet public place, and to the creaking, white-painted rib-backed settee. Here he could be in peace; except for the building manager, no one came up on the roof during business hours.

“Bloodhound?” Philip Mouse exclaimed with surprise.

Even though the garden had been described to the superintendent, reality exceeded his fantasy. He had not been prepared for the absurd dimensions: a magically pruned luxuriousness that seemed to hover freely high above the streets of Tourquai. I have to show this to Cordelia, he thought.

“Here you are,” said the police officer, sitting down on one of the two rib-backed settees at the table.

Mouse was on the couch. He still looked surprised. Not, however, in a negative way, the superintendent was able to discern.

“It sure is magnificent,” said the detective.

Bloodhound nodded and looked out over the edge of the tower. It was more than that. The aroma from the roses filled his nose.

“I was just thinking about you,” Mouse continued. “I heard sirens. Lots of sirens. Has something happened?”

“That depends on how you look at it,” Bloodhound growled. “But the fact that the infantile buck let himself be fooled isn’t so strange, is it?”

Mouse smiled, but there was an uncertainty about his smile.

“No . . .” he haltingly agreed.

“Besides, they’ve released Jasmine Squirrel. But maybe you already know that?”

“Squirrel?” asked Philip Mouse.

“That’s how it started,” said Bloodhound. “When I went up to Squirrel last Friday, your coat was hanging in her hall, Philip. I don’t know if that was only a mistake, or if you actually thought I wouldn’t see it. But that coat . . . it’s you.”

Mouse sat completely still on the uncomfortable wooden couch. He stared gloomily at Bloodhound and answered in a monotone, “I haven’t had that coat tailored, if that’s what you think. There are lots like it.”

“I checked,” Bloodhound sighed, turning his gaze across the city because it hurt less than looking at his former friend. “It wasn’t particularly difficult. Squirrel has been careful about hiding her tracks backward in time, but you haven’t been. Squirrel is the love of your life, isn’t she, Philip? We’ve talked about that, after all, that there has always been someone special—you’ve led me to understand that.”

“You have no idea about that,” said Mouse in a low voice.

“But I do,” Bloodhound objected, displaying a certain irritation. “Hell, it’s me you’re talking to, Philip. It’s me. When I searched for Squirrel in your life, she showed up everywhere. When you applied to the Police Academy a hundred years ago, she was one of your references. There’s a picture of you and her when you were interviewed after the case with the buzzard. And Jasmine gave your telephone number as a ‘close relative’ when she was admitted to the hospital ten years ago.”

“She did?”

“She did.”

“Okay,” Philip sighed. “I actually had no idea about that.”

“Can we get through this without losing our dignity?” Bloodhound growled.

“Get through what?”

Mouse was squirming in his seat, staring straight into the police superintendent’s eyes.

“Get through what?” he repeated in a louder voice.

“Well . . . maybe you should tell me.”

“I have nothing to tell, Larry. Absolutely nothing. I’m happy that Jasmine Squirrel is no longer at rue de Cadix, but I have nothing more to say.”

Bloodhound looked out toward the horizon. He felt heavy, tired, and downhearted; he had hoped for something else. He had felt it, the reason he was sitting here was bits of evidence, all of which pointed in the mouse’s direction. But the hope of being wrong had still been there. Well, no longer. Superintendent Bloodhound felt a premonition of the Lunch Breeze, which set his ear swinging, and he answered lightly, “What were you doing at the police station yesterday evening, Philip?”

“Huh?”

“You heard me.”

“I—”

“You couldn’t believe, after all the years at Chez Jacques, after having systematically gotten to know all the police officers in leading positions at rue de Cadix, that you could make your way into the building without anyone seeing you and recognizing you?”