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  It was absurd to the point that Dragon Aguado Molina got distracted. If he had not just been drinking that good wine, and if Fox had not been so blindingly beautiful, Molina most likely would have asked Vasko to escort the hopeful suitor down to the cellar along with the others, and nailed him up against one of the walls intended for nailing up stuffed animals. There Fox would have been hanging alongside the nightingale and the vole, all while the criminal element of the kitchen personnel at La Cueva slowly burned them, hair by hair. Or else Aguado Molina himself would have retrieved the oil from the deep-fat fryer in the kitchen—in which the city’s best deep-fried onions were prepared—mixed it with honey and then poured it over the suitor. In this way he had blinded others with eyes of plastic or glass so that they would never be able to cast their loathsome glances at Beatrice again.

  But the situation caught Dragon Aguado Molina by surprise.

  “What the hell?” he exclaimed.

  “I am Fox Antonio Ortega,” Fox hastened to clarify, as he approached the booth where Dragon was sitting. “And I do not know your daughter. Yet I know that I am right for her, and that she is right for me.”

  Molina was speechless. He stared at the beautiful fox, who was now standing within reach, and turned toward Vasko Manatee, still holding the wine bottle in his forelimb.

  Vasko shook his head slowly, but could not conceal an amused smile. And Molina could not keep from smiling himself. First carefully, tentatively—was this a joke?—but when he saw Ortega’s surprised expression, he realized that this was not the case. This made the situation even funnier. He let out his restaurateur laugh, and Vasko joined in.

  “Daddy, what’s so funny?”

  Suddenly she was standing there in the door to the kitchen, the beautiful Beatrice Cockatoo, and the laughter ceased. Dragon, fox, and manatee, all three of them, stared in surprise at the white apparition. Her father gathered his wits first.

  “Beatrice, honey, have you seen this fox before?” he asked.

  “Never,” Beatrice lied.

  “He has come here to ask for your claw,” Dragon revealed, and could not hold back his laughter. “As if this was some damn fairy tale. Who the hell behaves like that nowadays?”

  Beatrice did not reply. Fox Antonio Ortega had caught her gaze with his, and the suitor did not intend to let go.

  “Listen, you joker,” Dragon Aguado Molina chuckled, “you’re not right in the head, are you?”

  “My head has never been my strong suit,” Ortega admitted without letting Beatrice out of his sight for a moment.

  “No, no. No, you seem to be an honest, straightforward type. Of course you’ll have her.” Dragon Aguado Molina laughed.

  Beatrice started and turned toward her father.

  What was he saying? This couldn’t be happening.

  And the jubilant feeling of happiness that filled her in the next moment was stronger than anything she had experienced until now. During the weeks that followed she would return, again and again, to this feeling, confused and enchanted.

  The fox, too, looked in surprise at Dragon Aguado Molina.

  “You’re a good stuffed animal,” he said happily and contentedly. “I knew you would understand.”

  “Yes, yes, you will absolutely get to marry my daughter . . .” Molina continued cunningly. “But first you have to prove that you’re the right animal for her. We don’t know each other, do we?”

  Fox nodded seriously. That sounded reasonable.

  Vasko Manatee sensed what was coming and hid his smile behind his forelimb.

  “You must give me three things,” said Molina. “A feather. An arm. And a heart.”

  “A feather, an arm, and a heart?”

  “We’ll start with the feather,” said Molina, getting up. “It won’t be that hard. There’s a prosecutor here in Sors. Hawk Schleizinger. It would be fun to joke around with him a little. He has lots of feathers. He’ll give you one, won’t he, Fox? Come back with the hawk’s feather, then I’ll tell you about the arm. You have ten days. If you don’t have the feather by then, you can forget my beautiful Beatrice!”

  The Feather

  Fox Antonio Ortega went to work without delay and without giving a thought to how strange the whole thing was. Why should he get to marry Dragon Aguado Molina’s daughter by stealing a feather from Hawk Schleizinger’s plumage? That didn’t make sense. But Fox was so absorbed by his love for Beatrice Cockatoo that he did not care about logic or sense.

  It was not hard to find out where Hawk Schleizinger lived. True, he wasn’t in the phone book, but in Yok the phone book means nothing and contacts mean everything. Schleizinger was a known animal, and in the evening two days later Fox Antonio Ortega was standing on the sidewalk across from the hawk’s house, peering in through one of the windows on the bottom floor. A warm light from the desk lamp illuminated a small library.

  Hawk Schleizinger was sitting at his desk and looked up from his work. He rested his gaze on the long rows of leather-bound spines on the bookshelves. His nightclothes, blue-striped pajamas and a silk bathrobe, smelled of pipe tobacco and leather armchair. The silence was absolute.

  The computer was not turned on. In the evening Schleizinger avoided modern technology. That was how he separated his work at home from the office. He could access all archives and files from home if he wanted, but in solitude at the polished desk, where piles of paper were arranged with a system as irreproachable as his arguments in court, buzzing electronics did not seem to fit in. With paper and pen in his claws, he forced the flood of associations into controlled reflection.

  Above the liquor cabinet in the corner toward the terrace, four TV screens showed images from the surveillance cameras in the garden and out toward the street. At night they looked like blurry black-and-white photographs. Schleizinger lived in a stone building on fire red Mount Row in Amberville, and describing the neighborhood as tranquil was an understatement; nothing happened at night.

  For that reason the hawk raised his eyes from time to time, and looked over at the screen image, where a fox on the other side of the street was moving in and out of camera range.

  Schleizinger was an imposing bird, both by profession and by appearance. He always dressed in vest and suit, bow tie rather than necktie, and shoes polished so that the leather resembled varnish. Despite his curious gaze, Hawk Schleizinger always had a stern, cerebral air about him; heavy eyebrows; and a sharply curving beak. It was hard to imagine him in any other profession. He worked as chief public prosecutor at the court in the Sors District in Yok, and in the legal system in Mollisan Town there was probably no position more exposed. He had a reputation for being incorruptible; he had worked as a prosecutor in the district for more than twenty years, and had long ago given up on a political career. In other words, he was untouchable in a way that time and again made dragons, octopuses, and other animals of darkness plan attacks against him. Until now they had failed.

  No stuffed animal in Mollisan Town was as well guarded as Hawk Schleizinger.

  Schleizinger interrupted his writing and raised his eyes toward the surveillance monitors. Once again the fox passed the camera facing the street.

  Irritated, the prosecutor threw aside the pen and paper, got up, and went over to the screens. He sat down in front of the control board, turned on the recording function, and rewound.

  There.

  There was no doubt. Fox was staring right through the windows into the library where H
awk sat working.

  With his claw against the screen of the monitor Schleizinger drew a square around the fox’s head, and in a few seconds enlargements were created. Schleizinger pushed “send,” waited longer than was customary—perhaps the database was heavily used tonight—and then the information came up:

  Fox Antonio Ortega. No criminal record, but school records, medical records, and a clippings file of sports achievements. A young animal with miserable grades in school, not registered as a gang member, but from experience Hawk knew that this was uncertain information because the gangs recruited aggressively among the young. What was odd in this context was that Ortega had an impressive record as far as accomplishments in youth sports was concerned.

  Schleizinger continued reading, and it was only when he arrived at the family relationships that it started to make sense. The mother was Cat Bayas Delgado, the father a certain José Bear. In other words: the same bear who for the past four days had been sitting in jail in Sors waiting for trial.

  Schleizinger could not keep from smiling at the fact that only an hour ago he had been sitting with the bear’s papers before him on the desk.

  He picked up the phone, the one in the middle of the control board, and without dialing he was connected to Smithson Yak.

  “Is this about the fox out there?” Smithson asked before Hawk could even state his business.

  “He has a motive,” said the prosecutor.

  “Then we’ll bring him in,” Smithson answered.

  The hawk sat down again at the control panel. On the monitor he saw how Smithson’s stuffed animals ran out onto the street. They were all armed, but none had yet drawn a weapon. They were hesitating, but then Hawk saw one of them point at something outside the range of the camera, and they all started running that way.

  Poor fox, thought Hawk, smiling to himself.

  The chief prosecutor decided to interrogate the young Antonio Ortega first thing the next day. It never hurt to let them sit overnight.

  But in the car en route to court the following morning a surprise awaited. Hawk Schleizinger’s personal security force had come up empty-handed the previous night. Smithson, who was behind the wheel and had an anonymous colleague in a dark suit and sunglasses beside him, was forced to admit the failure.

  “I’ve never seen anyone run so fast,” he said. “I mean it, never. Not in- or outside a stadium.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Hawk asked. “That sounds improbable. There were four of you and he was alone?”

  “There could have been fifty-four of us,” Smithson answered, while he gently and sensitively maneuvered the lead-reinforced car through the dense morning traffic. “If you can’t catch them, numbers don’t help. His father is José Bear?”

  Smithson had access to the same database as the prosecutor.

  “Small-timer,” Schleizinger stated. “I’m not going to ask for more than three to six months. He seems to be the type who never climbs up to the next division. He was arrested for lottery fraud. Not much to make a fuss about.”

  “You’ve never run into Antonio Ortega before? There are no other connections?” Smithson asked.

  “That remains to be found out,” Schleizinger replied.

  They turned off the busy avenue and continued south on deep blue Avinguda de Pedrables. Even though it was one of Yok’s biggest throughways, it was noticeable how the pace of traffic decreased. In Mollisan Town’s poorest district, car activity was sparse. Through its complicated structure, the many dead ends, the recurring pirate attacks, plus the fact that few stuffed animals in Yok could afford a car, bicycles, skateboards, and roller skates were more common sights on the streets.

  The court in Sors was a gray, square concrete block of a building with long rows of square windows. It was on vanilla white Amiral Zee’s street, and outside the entrance the police had created a so-called security zone to deter organized crime from rescue attempts. Personnel who worked at the court used the garage to enter the building, and this also applied to the prosecutor. The entry ramp was located a few blocks south, and underground you drove back north, parked, and took the armored elevator up to your floor.

  With three cross streets left to the garage, Smithson Yak stopped at a light.

  They saw him at the same time.

  “Antonio Ortega!” Smithson Yak panted, pointing so his colleague could see.

  “The audacity!” Hawk Schleizinger exclaimed.

  On the sidewalk across from the court building, outside a small Springergaast, stood Fox Antonio Ortega. He was peering at the court’s main entrance.

  Even before the light turned green Smithson had given his orders. Via the internal radio he contacted the guards at the entrance to the court, and as the car with the prosecutor slowly passed Fox—who was on the left side—Yak could see police officers storming out of the building on the right.

  “I want him in the interrogation room as soon as possible. Just call me; I’ll come down,” said Hawk.

  “Understood, sir,” Smithson replied.

  He turned right onto the ramp to the garage and saw in the rearview mirror how Fox Antonio Ortega began running, with the police after him.

  When no word had come by lunchtime, Hawk summoned Smithson. The shame-faced yak, after failing for the second time to capture the fox, had even sent animals to Ortega’s latest known address, without success. Now he explained that he had not wanted to submit a report because he didn’t consider the case over with.

  “I’ll continue to work on the fox this afternoon,” the yak promised.

  That his own guards had not managed to capture the fox last night was one thing, but that the police failed—with their cars, motorcycles, and communications equipment—was worrisome. Hawk Schleizinger was sincerely surprised.

  During the afternoon the prosecutor managed to cross-examine a licorice troll indicted for having extorted money from his sister by threatening to expose her extramarital connections, plus make a final plea in the case of a drug-abusing locksmith, an argument that Hawk was personally satisfied with. It ended with the locksmith being sentenced to four years in King’s Cross, a sentence that Schleizinger would not appeal. After a short visit to chambers to change shirt, vest, and bow tie, the prosecutor hurried off to the elevators just in time for the Evening Weather and rode down to the garage, where the car was waiting with the motor running. Behind the wheel sat one of the many security animals with a dark suit and strong jawline, whom Hawk could not tell apart.

  He leaned back and closed his eyes while the car slowly rolled away toward the ramp. He did not need to say where he was going; his schedule had been confirmed and communicated for weeks. Twenty minutes’ sleep in the backseat was just what he needed.

  Once a month prosecutor Schleizinger had dinner with Manuela Hamster, the police chief in Sors. She was a professional administrator, an ambitious politician, but Schleizinger respected her anyway. She held her district in an iron grip, and her fight against corruption in the police force was genuine and reasonably successful. When the two did not meet at her office, they had dinner at Au Sultan. It was Schleizinger’s favorite restaurant, mostly due to the pickled radishes that were served as an appetizer. Both the prosecutor’s and the police chief’s bodyguards felt comfortable with the place; it was simple to secure and guard.

  Manuela Hamster was at the table when Hawk Schleizinger entered the restaurant. They had jointly decided that the table in the corner next to
the bar was the best. They sat with their backs to the wall, with a view of the entrance and restrooms opposite. The bodyguards sat at the window tables, and from the other direction they were protected by the lead-reinforced bar.

  “Congratulations,” said Manuela, rising briefly as Hawk sat down. “I heard you had yet another brilliant performance today. Four years, was that it?”

  “It wasn’t me,” Schleizinger answered modestly. “It was justice that triumphed. That happens sometimes. Extremely satisfying.”

  He was not a humorous stuffed animal. He picked up the menu from the table, but set it down again.

  “I already know what I want,” he said. “Have you decided?”

  Hamster opened the menu. She liked variety, and tried to remember what she had had the last time.

  “The salsicca, maybe?” she said.

  Schleizinger immediately raised a claw and signaled to the headwaiter that they were ready to order. He was in a hurry; work was piling up at home and he didn’t want to be too late.

  It took less than an hour to finish the appetizer and entrée. Over coffee they discussed the intensifying struggle against the gang leaders in Sors, a program they had launched jointly six months earlier, and which had already borne fruit. The Ministry of Finance had placed expanded resources at their disposal, and Hamster maintained that she felt they were close to a breakthrough. But suddenly she interrupted herself, and nodded toward the window.

  “That fox on the other side of the street, is that anyone you know?”

  Schleizinger controlled himself. He refrained from twisting his head, and instead leaned directly toward the bodyguard sitting closest.

  “Contact Smithson,” he said. “Say that the fox is back. Outside Au Sultan. And before you start chasing him, I want him surrounded. He won’t get away this time.”

  The bodyguard nodded, got up slowly, and went over to the kitchen to place the call. Schleizinger, meanwhile, let Hamster in on the situation, and together they continued conversing as they had their coffee, careful not to change body language or in some other way worry the fox, who was patiently hiding in the shadows on the sidewalk across from the restaurant.