could be removed from the list every fifth year.”
“At that time?”
Snake Marek would have shrugged his shoulders if he’d had any.
“It’s a morally instructive story, not historical truth.”
Snake fell silent and sipped his vodka without drinking it.
“Let’s hope that this is the fifth year, darling,” whispered Sam to Eric.
Sam finally went and lay down. Tom-Tom moved over to the couch, taking with him a giant bag of cheese doodles.
Eric remained at the kitchen table, gloomily collapsed with a mug of vodka in his paws and with his thoughts far back in time. The memory of the years at Casino Monokowski were usually pleasant, but now the usual feeling refused to make an appearance. Instead of being happy at seeing his old companions again, he felt downhearted.
“I think the crow is right,” hissed Snake in his ear.
Eric winced. Snake was standing on the kitchen counter, right behind him.
“The Chauffeurs don’t drive around at random,” Snake continued. “It’s completely obvious, of course, but it takes a stupid crow to put it into words. Our best possibility to get on the trail of the list is through the Chauffeurs.”
Eric got up from the kitchen table, realized that he could hardly stand straight, and infinitely slowly and carefully he went over to the balcony door. Cold air, he thought, was what he needed in order to think clearly. Snake followed behind. Out on the balcony Eric noted that the breeze had not yet died down. He had thought that dawn was quite near. The chill worked its way into his fur and there was a faint odor of bacon in the air.
“There’s something to that,” said Eric after taking a few deep breaths. “We have to find the Chauffeurs. If there’s a list, someone must deliver it to them.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said Snake.
“That’s why I asked you to come along,” said Eric. “To think. How do we go about this?”
“There are not an infinite number of ways to go about this.”
“I have a tougher nut to crack,” Eric added. “A problem worthy of you, I believe.”
They stood a while in the moonlight, looking into the lighted but deplorable apartments on the opposite side of the courtyard. Neither of them had mentioned a word about the letter Eric had written in his mother’s name and which had forced Snake to Yiala’s Arch.
“Let’s hear it,” said Snake without enthusiasm.
“Let us say,” said Eric, “that there was not only a reward offered if we succeed. Let us say that there is a punishment as well if we don’t succeed.”
Eric fell silent. Snake said nothing; the hypothesis spoke for itself.
“Let us say,” continued Eric along this rhetorical path, “that the threat looks like this: if Dove is carried off by the Chauffeurs, an animal close to me is going to be carried off in a comparable way by the dove’s gorillas.”
“I understand,” said Snake.
“Just as important,” said Eric, speaking more slowly than he had during the evening up till now, “as you helping us find the Death List, is that you give me an answer to the question of how I’m going to be able to save that animal close to me if we don’t succeed. And, Snake, I believe we don’t have very much time.”
TWILIGHT, 2
He turned slowly toward the skyline of Tourquai, a pincushion of the vanity and ambition of the builders. It was not by building monuments to himself that his greatness was manifested; that was not his way of defining power.
He himself was not interested in material things. He pretended to be materialistic because that gave him a kind of alibi; he owned a car he never drove and a house he seldom visited. His eyeglass frames were of the latest model, he wrote with an expensive pen and his shoes were purchased five floors up at Grand Divino. But these were disguises.
Power was not in owning, power was in directing.
He had the necessary means at his disposal, and he made use of them. He was a master of manipulation; with his words he could entice and seduce, poison and crush. It was a matter of logic. To have the ability to conceal it and then let it appear again in a manner which suited the overarching context. Nothing gave him the same satisfaction as when he succeeded in converting a resistant stuffed animal for his own purposes. Then he experienced moments of the dizzying intoxication of power, more powerful than anything else. Then life was a matter of pursuing this