Tourquai Read online

  “I was forced to search eight years back before I found traces of the vacuum-cleaning wall in his tax returns,” Falcon continued.

  “Do you mean you’ve searched through eight years of tax returns already this morning?”

  Falcon sat quietly. During his career this was the third murder investigation he had ever taken part in. This was major. Coming in early this morning and sitting hunched over a computer a few extra hours was the least he could do.

  “I took the opportunity to look in the Patent Office’s registry a little, too,” Falcon admitted.

  “Lunatic. Did you ever go home last night?”

  “I got home before midnight,” he lied.

  “I don’t want a partner who spends the nights on research and then isn’t sharp when we need it.”

  “I know,” said Falcon.

  Anna shared Larry Bloodhound’s sense of priorities. Police work was something you did out on the streets; cowardly bureaucrats sat behind desks.

  Falcon turned out onto the bloodred avenue and increased speed.

  “And the Patent Office?” asked Anna after a moment of silence.

  “Oleg Earwig has four new patents being processed right now. He has registered a hundred inventions since ‘the wall.’ But apart from the self-cleaning oven, none of them seems to have been a success. At least I’ve never heard of any of the others.”

  “So, an earwig hungry for cash and recognition,” Anna summarized.

  “Hmm. Might be right,” Ècu agreed.

  A few minutes later they drove through the golden Star, Mollisan Town’s geographic center and the roundabout from which the four avenues ran. You might get the impression that these broad streets had been the starting point for the city planners when the city was divided into districts, but nothing was farther from the truth. On the contrary, the fact was that before the four independent towns of Amberville, Tourquai, Lanceheim, and Yok grew together, political boundaries were the scene of battles for centuries. Today these boundaries were reduced to multilane expressways; only scattered monuments were a reminder of history.

  Western Avenue separated Amberville in the south from Tourquai in the north; Eastern Avenue separated Lanceheim in the north from Yok in the south. When Falcon turned into the poorest part of the district’s labyrinthine swarm of cramped, discolored streets and squares, as usual he could not avoid wondering what it would be like to work down here. Larry Bloodhound was the toughest police officer the falcon had ever met, but Bloodhound was also sitting safely in north Tourquai, where things were actually pretty good. The superintendents who worked at the police stations in Yok were made of different stuff. In these neighborhoods you never asked first.

  When they arrived, the address on Carrer de Carrera proved to consist of a large, freestanding warehouse, built of corrugated sheet metal, without windows, and bombarded with graffiti. Falcon chose to park a short distance away so as not to attract attention.

  “How much of the car do you think will be left when we leave here?” he asked worriedly as he locked the doors.

  “Falcon, now you’re not thinking right,” Anna replied with a broad smile. “You know, the secondhand market for police-car wheel rims is rather limited.”

  Obviously. The Volgas that the police drove were specially made. The spare parts only fit other police cars. Falcon swore to himself. Every time he tried to drop a comment that he thought sounded police-like, he only revealed his lack of experience. Who did he think he was fooling? Nervously he adjusted his pink scarf again.

  There was a doorbell, but after trying it they pounded on the door instead. Nothing happened.

  “Do we have the right address?”

  Falcon nodded. He was certain.

  They decided to see if there was an entrance at the back and went around. The building covered the entire block. On the other side there were tall windows and the sheet-metal walls were exchanged for wooden planks. From inside, the sound of continuous pounding was heard.

  “Check it out,” said Falcon, nodding.

  Through the windows they saw an earwig in a white coat running back and forth in front of a machine that resembled a printing press, but with more indicator lights and gauges.

  “C’mon, look, the door’s open,” Anna noticed, pointing.

  They went in. What they had not been able to see from outside was the impressive ceiling height of the space. Mechanical apparatus and technical gadgets were everywhere.

  “If I were five years old and imagining an inventor,” Anna whispered to Falcon, “it would be exactly like this.”

  The earwig stood with his back toward the door in front of a massive machine that rattled, hissed, and puffed. What the machine was doing was a mystery. The inventor held an oilcan in his hand, and he could not possibly have heard them arrive.

  Anna took a few steps forward, holding up her police badge.

  “Oleg Earwig?” she asked.

  Without taking his gaze from the oilcan and the machine and without turning around, Oleg shouted back.

  “That’s me, that’s me. Come back later. Come back tomorrow. Or next week. Next week. Right now I’m busy.”

  “Mr. Earwig,” Anna shouted to be heard above the noise, “we’re from the police department.”

  This had a certain effect. Earwig lowered the oilcan and twirled around. He was disgusting to look at, with long, hard feelers that stuck out from his head and razor-sharp fangs that hardly fit in his mouth. Arms and legs were poking out in all directions, it seemed. He was completely black, and the blackness was in sharp contrast to the white coat he was wearing.

  “This won’t take long, Mr. Earwig,” said Falcon. “We only want to ask a few questions.”

  “Don’t you see that I’m busy? Busy!”

  “We are, too,” Anna replied. “Do you have a place where we can sit down?”

  “Sit down? Sit DOWN? This is a cardan filibrator that’s about to explode. Explode! I can’t sit down!”

  “Turn off the machine for now,” Falcon ordered. “Otherwise you can come along up to the station. We can talk there instead, if you want.”

  “The station?” said Earwig, taking a few steps backward, astounded at this lack of respect.

  “C’mon, knock it off!” Anna insisted.

  Earwig looked from the lynx to the falcon and back again. He realized they were serious. Under protest, he turned off the hissing machine, muttering about irreversible processes and days of work that were now wasted. Then he led the police officers through the mechanical garbage dump that was his place of work. Among piles of potting soil, cans of fertilizer, and clay flowerpots was a round table where he sat down. With a preoccupied gesture from one of his many legs, he invited the police officers to be seated. He explained that the dirt on the floor was the remains of the unbelievably successful work he’d done on the organic toothbrush—on which new bristles grew by themselves.

  “Oswald Vulture,” said Anna, without revealing that she had never heard of such a toothbrush. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “Vulture?” Earwig repeated. “Oswald Vulture? Does that mean anything? To me? A bigger fraud than Oswald Vulture has never walked the streets of Mollisan Town. A more cold-blooded liar has never been fabricated! He is a disgrace to his breed, a disgrace to all breeds, to our society. Oswald Vulture should—”

  “Someone cut Oswald Vulture’s head off yesterday morning,” Falcon interrupted.

  “Good!” Earwig exclaimed with feeling. “Amazing! Not a day too soon. Not a single day. It should have been done a long time ago. I should have done it myself! A long time ago.”

  “That leads us to the next question,” said Anna without changing expression. “Where were you yesterday morning?”

  “Me?” Earwig was offended. “Me? Where was I? That’s none of your damn business!”

  “I must remind you that a murder has been committed,” said Falcon. “You seem to be taking this lightly.”

  “He’s missing a head,
you say?” Earwig continued. “He’s truly missing a head? Well, I’ll be damned. Not a day too soon. Not a day. I have an alibi, don’t worry about that, sweet little cat.”

  “I am not a—”

  “Headless, headless, headless,” the inventor sang. “Yes, what the hell . . .”

  “Hasn’t Nova Park invested considerable money in your company?” asked Falcon.

  Oleg Earwig was not listening.

  “How did they cut his head off?”

  “For investigative reasons we can’t comment on that,” Anna interjected before Falcon said too much.

  “No,” Earwig replied, nodding. “No, that doesn’t matter. Yes, the company. Yes, can it be any more rotten than that? He betrayed me, that SWINE! He betrayed me. I was in the middle of great, revolutionary work on my Dry-o-plex, and—”

  “Dry-o-plex?” asked Falcon.

  “The drying cabinet,” Earwig explained. “I was in the process of transforming our dreary drying cabinets into four-dimensional cinemas! Instead of standing there, drying for hours, you have flat screens around you, above your head and under your claws. You’re standing on the movie! The experience is . . . it can’t be described. Not a single wet stuffed animal in this city is going to want to be without a Dry-o-plex.”

  Earwig fell silent and considered this. Then he nodded in agreement with himself.

  “It sounds . . .” Falcon began, uncertain of how it sounded.

  “But that SWINE pulled out. That SWINE! He betrayed me. Betrayed me. Pulled the rug out. I was there yesterday morning and talked with him. I’m sure you know that. He let me fall. I fell. I’m falling. But now . . . now I’m falling with a smile!”

  “And your . . . alibi?” asked Anna. “You may have been the last person to see him alive. As you know, it’s hard to determine exact times during the latter half of the Morning Weather. Can you account for your whereabouts yesterday morning?”

  Oleg Earwig stood up.

  “Of course I can. Foolishness. Now I have to get back to my cardan filibrator,” he explained. “I don’t have time for this. Arrest me, if you want!”

  He held out a pair of his arms theatrically. Anna shook her head.

  “No, exactly,” said Earwig triumphantly. “I didn’t think so. I refuse to disclose what I was doing yesterday after the meeting with the cursed Vulture. I have personal reasons. Personal! But Balder Toad will vouch for me. I spent the rest of the morning together with Toad. For personal reasons I’m not saying more. But that should be enough. Toad is my guarantor.”

  Falcon recorded the toad’s name in his notebook.

  “You’ve put me in a very good mood, little cat!” Earwig said to Anna. “This may turn out to be a good day!”

  And he disappeared behind the scrap iron. Soon the racket of the big machine was heard again, and Ècu and Lynx left the inventor’s peculiar world on Carrer de Carrera.

  2.4

  Superintendent Larry Bloodhound went straight back to his office after the morning meeting with Tapir, Hare, Ècu, and Lynx. He shut the door to the office area; the shades on the window were already lowered; it was mid-morning but it could have been any time of day. He sat down behind his desk, belched audibly, and looked around. The office was claustrophobic. The thought of how many hours of his life he had spent in there overwhelmed him. All those papers. Carelessly spread out, piled in collapsing heaps, wadded up in little balls, or stuck into coffee-stained plastic folders. On the cheap bookshelves behind him were white, gray, and black binders he had inherited from whoever had been in the office before him. The bloodhound’s own contributions to the bookshelf were of a different type. Half-consumed mugs of coffee. Concealed, half-eaten lunches so moldy they no longer smelled, and too disgusting for the cleaning people to dispose of. A novel or two testified to cultural ambitions; heaps of crossword-puzzle magazines suggested melancholy. On the only empty wall in the office hung a large, framed piece of art: a blurry charcoal drawing possibly depicting a barn, which he’d won when he was a member of the station’s art club. The musty odor in the room—Larry’s aftershave mixed with bacon and stale beer—had forever settled into the black-and-white-striped carpet.

  He took out paper and pen and decided to calculate how many carbohydrates he had put away yesterday—to figure out what he could allow himself today. But before he could even begin, he remembered the piece of chocolate he’d eaten en route to the widow Flamingo. He put the pen aside. His thoughts went to yesterday evening and the cocaine that kept him from drinking up the cream in the fridge. If it hadn’t been for the struggle against weight, he would never have started using the drug. Besides, the first few months had been successful. He’d lost a lot of weight, and the urge for sugar disappeared. But then, after about a year, the desire for food slowly returned. Despite coke in the evenings—and sometimes at lunch—he again started fantasizing about warm syrup, caramel sauces, and meringues. It was inexplicable, but true nonetheless.

  Perhaps a different strategy. Phasing out. Instead of counting carbohydrates, would it perhaps be enough to simply eat less today than yesterday? Start a slower but perhaps more realistic journey toward the perfect body? In the lower right-hand desk drawer he expected to find the remnants of a honey-glazed pineapple, but the drawer was empty. Larry sighed and got up. Might as well head out to Nova Park and have a serious talk with the cobra. Maybe he could stop on the way and pick up a little something?

  In Bourg Villette’s entry hall the frog recognized the superintendent. After an astoundingly rapid elevator ride sixty-one floors up through the building’s incomprehensible metal body, Bloodhound got out at Nova Park’s office. He went up to the young goat in reception, smiling broadly.

  “You remember me, right?”

  “Quite frankly . . . ,” the goat replied, looking embarrassed, “I believe so . . . Don’t say a word. I’ll think of it—”

  The superintendent took out his identification. “Magnus gives to some and takes from others,” he growled. “What’s your name?”

  “Goat Croix-Valmer,” the goat replied.

  “Croix-Valmer,” Bloodhound repeated as he wrote down the goat’s name in his book. “Good. Listen up, Croix-Valmer. I’d like to speak with Emanuelle Cobra first. Is she here?”

  Goat nodded toward the corridor.

  Bloodhound found Emanuelle Cobra at the desk where she had been sitting yesterday. Today she was wearing a turquoise top not quite as revealing as the blouse she’d had on the day before.

  “Bloodhound,” the superintendent barked as he entered the office. “We’ve already met, of course. I have a few questions.”

  Cobra inspected him up and down. He wore a large-checked shirt under a jacket so stained and tattered that its filth couldn’t be described. His jeans were worn smooth even on the thighs, and the heavy boots might possibly have been suited to a nighttime walk in the forest. Bloodhound suddenly felt uncomfortable.

  “I’ve already answered questions, my friend,” said Cobra.

  “And you’re going to answer more questions, ‘friend,’ ” Bloodhound barked angrily.

  Cobra sighed, but didn’t contradict him.

  So as not to be at a disadvantage, the superintendent avoided the vacant chair across from the secretary, sitting instead on the edge of the desk. But in doing so he knocked over a penholder, which fell to the floor with a crash.

  “Do you want to watch me pick it up?” asked Cobra, smiling derisively. “I can do it really slow.”

  Bloodhound was ashamed. Partly about how clumsy he’d been, partly because she’d embarrassed him. He decided to go on the offensive.

  “You realize of course that you’re in a bad situation,” he began. “Someone cut the head off your boss while you’re sitting outside, and you maintain that no one has gone in or out. Then, my little dear, there’s only one suspect.”

  “Nonsense,” Cobra answered.

  “Nonsense?”

  “Nonsense,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, I told the falcon e
verything. Both Earthworm and Earwig were in to see Oswald yesterday morning.”

  “Those were just regular meetings?”

  “I have no idea what sort of meetings they were,” Cobra replied. “Oswald never has the door open. You can ask Earthworm, he’s here today. As far as that inventor is concerned, I’ve always thought that he was disgusting.”

  “Did Oleg Earwig visit often?”

  “Before. But yesterday was the first time in a long while. Maybe six months?”

  “Did you speak with Vulture after Earwig had left?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see Vulture when Earwig left?”

  “Yes,” said Cobra less certainly. “Yes, I think so. We didn’t talk to each other, but I think I saw him through the doorway.”

  “You think? You have to know whether you saw him or not.”

  “I saw him,” Cobra repeated.

  But it was apparent that she had lost interest in the conversation. After the initial provocations, she now seemed almost bored.

  “And how long was it between the time Earwig left and we arrived?” Bloodhound continued.

  “I don’t really know,” Cobra answered. “Half an hour maybe? An hour? It’s always hard to say before lunch.”

  What she was saying was true; the weather and therefore time were impossible to interpret in detail before the Lunch Breeze because nothing changed.

  “And you still maintain that you were sitting at your desk the whole morning?” the superintendent asked.

  Cobra sat silently awhile, considering how she should answer. Then she decided, met the superintendent’s gaze, and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was.”

  “This is just idiotic,” Bloodhound growled. “Idiotic! I don’t believe you. I’m asking you again. Did you ever leave your desk?”

  Emanuelle Cobra looked at him with her large walnut eyes. She had already answered the question. Finally he turned his gaze away and got up.