Yok Read online

  Yok

  Tim Davys

  Contents

  Sors

  Pertiny

  Corbod

  Mindie

  About the Author

  Also by Tim Davys

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Sors

  The Task

  There was once a fox who was stricken by love. The fox’s name was Antonio Ortega, and this love was of a rare variety, the kind you only experience once in your life. Her name was Beatrice Cockatoo, and the moment the fox saw her he knew it was her or no one.

  Ortega was not a stuffed animal with much sense. Up to this point he had lived his life without direction, but the day he saw Cockatoo everything changed. From one moment to the next he was filled by a purpose that gave his life meaning.

  Fox Antonio Ortega was one of the most beautiful stuffed animals that had ever been delivered to Mollisan Town. His intensely dark red fur glistened as if strewn with gold dust. His stuffing was so compact and hard that not the slightest unevenness could be found, his seams so discreet not even the rain could reveal them. His nose was made of onyx and his eyes were opals; his ears stood at strict attention and his tail, with a tip as white as sugar, was so majestic it caused other stuffed animals to turn around on the street and sigh with envy.

  The day he went to ask for Beatrice Cockatoo’s claw he put on the finest clothes he had: a stylish, narrow-cut black suit in the latest pattern, a white shirt, and a dark red tie that reinforced the color of his own fur. Ortega the fox was as poor as everyone else in the neighborhood, but he had plenty of clothes. On his way toward saffron yellow Puerta de Alcalà he took the detour past Cle Torija, where he bought three long-stemmed, golden yellow roses at the Sors Rose Studio. A little farther down the same street he stopped at Sax’s Fabrics and Notions and bought an exclusive polishing cloth for eyes, beak, and nose. The cloth had small embroidered roses on the edge, and he had it wrapped in a red silk ribbon that also cost a pretty penny. But, Fox Antonio Ortega reasoned, this was the first and last time he was going courting.

  Beatrice Cockatoo lived on the top floor of La Cueva, a restaurant believed by many to be the foremost in all of Mollisan Town and run by her father, the frightful Dragon Aguado Molina. In his role as restaurateur and host at La Cueva, Dragon made an effort to appear jovial and a little silly. At the restaurant his physical appearance was more grandiose than unpleasant. He was not green, like many others of his sort, but dark and alarmingly violet. His sharp teeth glistened in his mouth, which was padded with a fiery red silk fabric, and from the farthest tip of his long tail, across his back and all the way up to the neck, he had triangular black patches of cloth standing straight up. His arms were short while the claws on his back feet were thick as bottlenecks.

  Molina laughed loudly as he piloted the guests to their tables, he applauded his own jokes—though he knew how ridiculous that looked with his short arms—and he let his long tail sweep along the floor while pretending not to be aware of it. The guests loved it.

  But Dragon Aguado Molina was only a fat, kindly, amusing restaurateur five evenings a week (La Cueva was closed Sundays and Mondays). When he had his henchmen smash the furnishings of a storekeeper who didn’t pay his “insurance premiums,” Aguado Molina no longer appeared silly. No jovial laughter was heard as he mercilessly burned up squealers and forced the cubs of police officers to betray their parents. When he counted his protection money, he served up no applause or good-hearted smiles.

  For stuffed animals living in other parts of Mollisan Town, Yok, the southeast part of the city, was one big source of infection, an evil that could only be tolerated by being ignored. For those of us who lived there, its four districts were distinct.

  Mindie was Yok’s northwest corner. Bordering Amberville and Lanceheim, it was the entertainment district of that part of the city. Stuffed animals went there at night and stayed out until the wee hours. For the poor creatures who lived in the midst of this melting pot of drug trade, prostitution, and gambling, there was only one possible strategy: hose down the sidewalks in the morning and go on with their laborious lives without worrying about what happened outside their doors.

  The area south of Mindie that bordered the forests south of the city was called Pertiny. The cityscape in Pertiny differed from the rest of Yok and was dominated by large, flat, and similar industrial buildings, surrounded by expansive parking lots and tall chimneys that day in and day out spewed forth foul-smelling, gray-black smoke; anywhere you were in the district there was a pungent, acid stench.

  Corbod made up the southeast tip of Mollisan Town and Yok. Corbod differed from the other districts in that trash collection functioned, the bulbs in the streetlights were changed when they burned out and the potholes in the asphalt were repaired instead of traffic being rerouted up onto the sidewalks. The stuffed animals in Corbod got up in the morning, went to work—some worked in other parts of the city—and returned home again in the evening by way of food stores and day-care pickups. They lived a life that made society function, and they longed for nothing different and better.

  Dragon Aguado Molina resided in the fourth district, called Sors, wedged in south of mint green East Avenue and east of deep blue Avinguda de Pedrables. In Sors were the official buildings and agencies that Mollisan Town had relocated to Yok for the sake of fairness and job opportunities, including the city’s largest library; a large university campus; and a number of well-maintained stone buildings where the ministries of Environment, Finance, and Culture had been forced to house various less significant committees and departments. The area where Molina had ruled for more than thirty years was a bit south of the official buildings, and consisted of almost forty blocks where saffron yellow Puerta de Alcalà comprised the northern border and indigo blue Calle Gran Via its eastern boundary. Though Aguado Molina had controlled the neighborhood for so long, he took nothing for granted; internal power struggles, gang warfare, and maintaining official corruption were an ongoing process. For the past few months he had been provoked by an octopus who made repeated, irritating incursions from the north. Molina underestimated no one but did note that many of the octopus’s sort had come and gone over the years.

  The day when Fox was on his way with flowers and the polishing cloth to La Cueva had begun unhappily for the gangster boss. His breakfast was always served in the private dining room facing the courtyard, and this morning, before he had read the sports pages or wiped the egg yolk from the corner of his mouth, Luciano Hyena showed up with depressing news. In a pinstripe suit, Hyena stood at the threshold to the dark room like a little cub, voice shaking, and looked at the floor as he told what had happened. The morning liquor transport to Tourquai had been ambushed in one of Yok’s thousands of narrow alleys, and now moonshine was running down the sidewalk instead of down the rich throats who paid generously for a beautiful label and a stylish bottle, regardless of the content.

  Dragon threw down his napkin and hurried into the restaurant. He screamed his orders at Luciano: Everyone who had been in that truck should immediately appear at La Cueva and be held accountable. Just as the hyena was leaving to execute the order, Molina’s per
sonal bodyguard, Vasko Manatee, came running from the Little Bar, where he was having his morning coffee.

  “Witnesses!” the dragon roared at Vasko. “There must be someone who saw what happened!”

  The dragon placed himself at the headwaiter’s station and dialed the number to the local police, while Vasko made his way to the streets in search of someone who would be forced to tell Aguado Molina what they had seen. The dragon listened to the phone ringing as he calculated in his head what he had lost on the transport, and how much he would be forced to raise prices to compensate for the reduction in income. But those details weren’t the most essential. Most important was to set an example. No one was allowed to think you could challenge Dragon Aguado Molina and go unpunished.

  It took a couple of hours, but then the unfortunates that Luciano Hyena and Vasko Manatee managed to get hold of appeared. Molina was sitting in one of the half-moon-shaped booths on a red velvet couch. On the round table in front of him was a small cup of espresso, which he sipped meditatively while Manatee brought up one stuffed animal after another who had to stand in the middle of the empty restaurant floor and tell what happened. Molina asked a question or two, but he wouldn’t have needed to.

  The stuffed animals who worked for the dragon and were responsible for the transport, like those who lived in the neighborhood and had seen, or thought they’d seen, what happened with the truck, stammered out their confessions. Shadows rested over the large dragon on the couch. He yawned at regular intervals, and at the sight of the sharp fangs in the massive red jaws, all the witnesses got talkative. It did not take long for him to understand what had happened.

  Somehow Octopus Callemaro—these days it was almost always that confounded octopus!—and his crew had found out the route of the transport, constructed a barrier of scrap in the path of the vehicle, and overpowered the driver and guards when the truck was forced to stop. The load had been smashed, which was quicker than trying to carry away the thousands of bottles on the truck, and it was all over in a few minutes. Presumably Callemaro knew which wholesalers the liquor was headed for, and presumably today these wholesalers had to buy liquor from Callemaro instead.

  Dragon Aguado Molina was listening with half an ear to the stuffed animals’ confessions. In the middle of the day a restaurant can feel like one of civilization’s most deserted places. The overly bright lighting above the bar, the chairs turned upside down on the tables, and the smell of cigarette butts and alcohol from last evening: a space created for life and enjoyment becomes frightening when exposed to daylight and emptied of stuffed animals. The coffee in his cup cooled before he could finish it. On the shelf above the bar on the other side of the room was his favorite wine, but he resisted the temptation.

  When there were only a couple of stuffed animals left to question, Molina decided—one of each. That was always a sensible principle. He would punish one of his own, because someone must have told about the route, and one of the stuffed animals who lived in the neighborhood, because they hadn’t told about the scrap barrier the octopus’s crew had built ahead of time.

  He could not bear listening to the final confessions. Instead he waved Vasko Manatee over to him, and randomly selected a vole and a nightingale that he thought were suitable to torture. Vasko dragged the wretches to the cellar below La Cueva, where they had to wait in the room next to the freezers, and where there was plenty of equipment to torment a stuffed animal with, artfully and at length.

  Then Vasko sent the others home. The dragon sighed heavily, yielded to temptation, and asked for a glass of the excellent red wine.

  As Vasko poured, Molina muttered to himself, “We have to do something about that suckerfish.”

  Before Vasko could answer, the unexpected happened: Dragon and Manatee watched as a lone figure stepped unannounced into the restaurant through the doorway from the Little Bar. It was a fox. His fur shimmered like red spangles, his steps were light and determined at the same time.

  “Dragon Aguado Molina?” the fox asked.

  The dragon stared at the stranger. Vasko did the same.

  “I have come to ask for your daughter’s claw.”

  One might wonder about Fox Antonio Ortega’s arrogance. How could he, how did he dare? But for one thing you must remember that Ortega was no intellectual giant, and it is unclear whether he truly understood the extent of his actions. Besides, Ortega was used to getting what he wanted, without having to ask. There were doors that beauty always opened, and the fox was used to being adored.

  Would it be better, perhaps, to try to explain Antonio Ortega’s hubris by telling it from a different perspective? I think immediately of Wolle Hare, and the evening Fox saw his beloved Beatrice for the first time.

  Hare was a legend in the advertising industry, and had seen models come and go over the years. But he was the first to admit that Fox’s pictures were sensational.

  Hare leaned back, twirled around toward the window so that he was sitting with his back to the desk, holding up one of the photo sheets.

  “Completely out-of-this-world amazing,” he commented.

  Cat Nikolaus sat on the other side of the desk in Hare’s elegant corner office with adjoining conference room. The cat had on trendy short jeans, black patent-leather shoes, and a washed-out T-shirt, none of which was by chance. Now his mission was to agree with the boss in an intelligent way.

  “Can’t be said better,” he said. “It’s a brilliant piece of work. The composition. The tail that follows up the lines of the chair. And there’s a forlornness in his eyes that’s—”

  “He’s so damn good-looking”—Hare’s voice was heard from the other side of the tall chair back.

  “Yes . . . good-looking. But . . . it’s not just that,” Nikolaus agreed without losing integrity. “There’s something in his eyes that makes stuffed animals—”

  Wolle Hare twirled around and fixed his eyes on the cat, who only a week ago had been named vice president, executive creative concept director. Hare waved the pictures.

  “Don’t be so damn pretentious, Cat, or I’ll take a few words out of your title. This has nothing to do with his eyes. This fox is just plain better looking than any other stuffed animal we’ve captured on film in the last decade.”

  Hare was the creative aspect of the duo Wolle & Wolle, Lanceheim’s leading advertising agency. Together with the more financially talented Wolle Toad, the two Wolles had more than fifty years’ experience in the industry, and the pictures the hare was holding were among the best he’d seen.

  “And they said he could only do clothing,” said Cat, pretending not to hear the reprimand.

  Fox Antonio Ortega was nineteen years old at the time, and his first advertising campaign was pasted on large billboards all over Mollisan Town and shone through the night from the tops of buses. Fox Antonio Ortega had done what no one else could in Luigi Barcotta’s tight-fitting suits; long cardigans; and narrow, colorful pants: He looked comfortable. The fashion industry realized at one stroke that anyone who got an exclusive contract with the model Ortega had gained an unbeatable head start.

  But Wolle Hare was one step ahead, and in his paw he held his next challenge: He had decided to use Fox in a campaign for the new model of Volga Sport. There was infinitely more money to make in the car industry than in fashion and, besides, it was about linking Ortega to Wolle & Wolle, not to any brand or product. The pictures he was looking at depicted Fox behind the steering wheel.
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  “He’s perfect here, too,” Wolle asserted.

  “Perfect,” Cat agreed. “And if I may say—”

  But he got no further than that; applause coming from the studio made him fall silent.

  “What’s going on?” Hare asked.

  The cat was already on his way to the door to find out. He returned half a minute later.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said. “It’s our new photo model.”

  “They’re applauding him? Why are they applauding?”

  “Don’t know,” said Cat. “Maybe they think it’s thanks to him that Barcotta’s campaign is a success?”

  “Are you being ironic?” Wolle asked. “I hate irony.”

  “No, no,” Cat Nikolaus quickly answered. “I mean it. They think Fox Ortega is a hero. And then they think he’s beautiful. That’s obviously worth some applause.”

  “Idiots,” the hare muttered, getting up from the desk. “Go and bring Fox here before they gobble him up.”

  And Cat Nikolaus again ran out to the studio to do as he was told.

  Less than an hour later, Fox Antonio Ortega was sitting with Wolle Hare in the backseat of a black limousine traveling south on sky blue South Avenue. The Evening Weather was on its way in over the city, the traffic heavy. On the ceiling of the car, a starry sky glistened in miniature and Fox could not tear his gaze from it. Hare poured a substantial whiskey for himself. He had not intended to drink this evening, but the crystal glasses in the car door’s teak shelf clinked so delightfully that it was impossible to resist. Fox, on the other hand, had declined.

  “That’s wise, my friend,” said Hare. “This evening is an important one.”

  “I’ve never had a drink,” Fox Antonio Ortega explained.