home, more than anything else: home to her embrace, where time stood still and all there was, was the scent of her fur and the beating of her heart against his chest.
She fixed her eyes on him. Pretended to look stern. And he wanted so much to laugh at her little play-acting but instead felt how the tears were burning inside his eyelids and he knew that he couldn’t cry, couldn’t expose himself: he loved her and would never be able to lose her.
It was that simple.
“I don’t know exactly who is writing the list,” said Bataille, “but I know how she gets the information.”
The large propeller was slowly set in motion as the light breeze picked up, but the horizon was still hidden by night. Eric sat rigid as a stick in his corduroy armchair, trying to control his facial features, the nervous twitches of his whiskers, and the indulgent smile that he knew made him weak. Across from him sat the fear-inducing hyena. True, it appeared unlikely that this whispering conversation they were carrying on would end with him getting up and torturing the bear to death. But nothing was impossible.
Eric Bear’s senses were on tenterhooks. At the Garbage Dump he saw not only the outlines of a discarded frying pan, a wheel-less baby buggy, and the prow of an old rowboat sticking up out of the gray-black mass of rubbish; in addition he could make out the odor of decaying coffee grounds from the stinking entirety, heard two horses neighing in the distance, and perceived the structure in the armchair’s fabric, as if it were braille.
It was clear that Bataille had overheard the conversation Eric had recently had with Rat Ruth. Perhaps the hyena had been sitting in the darkness along one of the walls and listened; it didn’t need to be any stranger than that.
“It wasn’t the idea that I should know,” hissed Bataille. “She doesn’t know that I know.”
The hyena was proud of his cunning and that he’d figured out how the one thing was connected to the other. The used clothes that the well-situated residents of the city donated to the church were gathered together and driven out to the dump once a month. Sometimes the deliveries were so extensive that a burly funeral director came with a whole truckload of clothes. Other months all you got was a package of coats that had been wrapped in brown wrapping paper and placed on a wheelbarrow that was pushed by a creaky old doorman or some former cantor with rheumatism.
The clothes came to good use, the hyena assured him, fingering the short, worn leather jacket he himself was wearing. All the animals at the Garbage Dump had clothes that came from the church’s donations; there weren’t any others. And sometimes, when the shipments were especially large, Rat sold back some of them to the stores in the city that dealt in used goods.
“It took a while before I noticed it,” said Hyena. “But whether it was a delivery truck or a wheelbarrow, it was always the queen herself who took in the delivery.”
The breeze that had caused the large propeller to whirl like a mighty windmill presaged the arrival of dawn. If Hyena’s story had been disturbed earlier by creaking from the blades of the propeller, for a while now the sound had been a constant whine. Eric pushed the armchair closer to the table and leaned forward as well, whereupon he came so close that he could perceive the hyena’s musty breath. There was a burnt smell from the predator’s mouth. The dark of the night would remain dense for a while yet, but the starlight caused the hyena’s eyes to flash as he twisted around and stared out toward the dump. It was an ice-cold radiance.
“I already knew that we were involved with the Death List,” said Bataille. “When I came here I didn’t believe in the list, but…but even when I knew…I didn’t know more than that.”
From the very start Bataille had become one of the Cleaners at the dump. The Cleaners were divided into three teams of five animals each. Once a week, sometimes more often but never less often than that, Ruth gave them written orders. These were crumpled scraps of paper which she solemnly handed over inside the great hall, where, in her terrible handwriting, she had scribbled down a few addresses—she’d learned to write as an adult—and the assignment was always the same. Empty the apartment. Throw away