Order Room, setting his briefcase down on the floor while he dug in his pocket for a key. He unlocked the door, took the briefcase, and went into the room, from which he came out again after scarcely half a minute. He’d vanished before the moment had even become exciting.
Eric remained standing in the doorway and peeked.
“Why are we still standing here?” asked Sam impatiently. “He’s definitely gone.”
“That was the Cub List,” whispered Eric.
And he’d scarcely uttered the word before the elevator announced the next visitor. This one, however, had a quite different appearance.
To begin with, it took a while before he showed himself in the north corridor. And when he finally arrived, it was as though he’d gotten lost. With lingering steps he looked around time after time. He was a threadbare camel with shoes so worn the right heel was missing. His pants looked as though he’d slept in them for several weeks, and the shirt that hung down over his thighs was spotted black by soot or oil. When he proved to have the key to the Order Room on a chain around his neck, they all understood that this was the only possibility: this animal was born with pockets with holes in them.
The camel went into the Order Room and came out again. The whole thing went very quickly, but in contrast to the earlier, correct civil servant with his briefcase, it was impossible to see if the camel had taken a list along.
“Now?” whispered Sam.
“We’ll wait until we hear the elevator,” Eric whispered back.
He involuntarily put his paw in his pocket and squeezed the key. It was the key that he’d had made when he was young, the key that he’d copied in modeling clay from Mother’s key ring. And what if it didn’t work? If it was the wrong key, and had been the wrong key for all these years? Or if the ministry had quite simply changed the locks since then? Stranger things had happened.
“Now, then?”
Sam’s impatience demanded no explanation. All four of them had calculated what risk they were taking as of now. If the camel had actually set a Death List…a real Death List in the locked Order Room, ChauffeurTiger could arrive at any moment to fetch it. And no one, not even Tom-Tom, had any desire to run into the tiger.
“Now,” said Eric.
He opened the door to the restroom and quickly crossed the dark corridor. Without hesitating, without thinking, he put the key in the Order Room lock and turned it.
It worked.
When he stepped into the small room, where, just as his mother had always said, there was only a table and a desk blotter, he immediately saw the two envelopes. The one neat with typewritten letters on the front, the other looking like it had been crumpled up, thrown into a puddle, hung up to dry, and then ended up here. Eric felt Snake’s presence right behind him, and intuitively he realized that there was no time to waste. Without appearing any too urgent, he ran over to the table and snatched the battered envelope at the same moment as the snake was making his way up the legs of the table with the intention of doing the same thing. Eric took a few steps to the side and opened the envelope. There was no risk that anyone would notice that the envelope had been opened and closed again; the shabby camel had seen to that.
A piece of paper, and there was a list with names, eighteen of them, typewritten in a column. Eric read.
What was there was impossible.
It was not only Nicholas Dove’s name that Eric recognized on the Death List. There was another name that he knew more than well. Terror and shock caused Eric Bear to become dizzy, feel nauseous. He took a deep breath, pulled himself together, and looked up from the paper.
“It’s true,” Eric Bear said without moving. “There is a Death List.”
CHAPTER 15
The bedroom was bathed in the gentle daylight coming in through the drawn, white curtains. On a massive double bed, thick down comforters and a dozen shapeless pillows created a white lunar landscape with high mountains and deep ravines. Resting in this realm of softness was the delicate, unclothed body that was Emma Rabbit. She was lying on her stomach, with her legs scissored around a thick bedspread and her face turned to the right, toward the windows.
The walls of the bedroom were white, the oiled oak boards of the parquet