what should be thrown away, bring back the valuables. Clean out everything. And leave the place as though no one had been there.
The first months, Bataille thought this was a matter of tips that Ruth had gotten from part of the criminal network she worked for. A kind of repayment for services rendered. They supplied her with information about when families went on vacation, stayed with relatives, wound up in the hospital, so that she could empty their abandoned houses. What the hyena didn’t understand was why they were forced to clean up after themselves so carefully. Perhaps, he thought, this was a manifestation of some sort of vanity? Ruth was not always easy to understand.
Bataille came onto the trail of the truth in the form of an old female cat whom they met in a stairwell one morning when Hyena and the Cleaners had been on their way up to the sixth floor in a newly built apartment house in Lanceheim.
“Are you going to Kohl’s?” the cat had asked, and Bataille had nodded since “Kohl” was one of the names that was on the week’s crumpled scrap of paper. “Poor devil, may his soul find peace now.”
And the cat had shaken her head and continued down the stairs.
Only the hyena had heard the cat’s comments, and he kept it to himself. Bataille knew that his reputation was growing, that the animals feared what was a fortunate combination of imagination and a lack of empathy. He also knew that the moment he lost the queen’s favor his hours were numbered. As soon as it was possible, the hyena gathered information which perhaps might prove valuable the day Ruth no longer shielded him.
During the following months he tried to get evidence for his hypothesis. When it was possible—and it wasn’t always—he strayed from the ongoing cleanup work in search of neighbors who could confirm that the apartment or the house they were going through belonged to an animal who had been carried away by the Chauffeurs the day before. Sometimes it was impossible to find anyone to ask, and the hyena had to return to the Cleaners with unfinished business. But he was not in a hurry, and often enough he got the answer he wanted. Finally he was certain.
The Cleaners were, without knowing it, the Chauffeurs’ rear guard.
Eric Bear loved to listen when Emma Rabbit told stories.
After dinner they went in and sat in the oversized lounge suite of thick, beige cotton that dominated their living room on Uxbridge Street. The armchairs were so massive that it was impossible to sit normally in them. Involuntarily you ended up in a kind of half-lying position, with your legs under you on the chair or pointing straight out over the armrest, and it was in the latter manner that Eric Bear made himself comfortable and listened.
Emma was sitting on the couch. She had brought her wine with her, and she held her glass on her lap while she told about the past week. She spoke without gestures, without dramatizing her tone of voice, but her urgency was not to be missed. She had been working on a new project for the past few months, she told. It was a suite of memory tableaux from her early childhood; to be more exact, seven scenes which she repeated in various perspectives and techniques, sometimes all seven on the same canvas but more often one or two at a time. In the previous week she had worked exclusively in oils.
Eric listened and nodded. Never, he thought, was she anywhere other than here. Not even when she devoted herself to her childhood, which she often did in her art. It had to do with her energy, thought Eric, the quiet, burning force that caused Emma Rabbit to follow through with all the projects she embarked on. Some with a certain success, others best forgotten.
“Now I’m coming over to you,” he said in the middle of a sentence, and she continued to talk as he—carefully, so that he wouldn’t bump her wineglass—rolled out of the armchair and crept over to her on the couch. He sat right next to her so that he could feel her warmth. With his head against her shoulder he continued to listen with closed eyes.
“Despite all my theories, I never believed, not once, that it was Ruth who made the Death List,” said Bataille.
He suddenly fell silent.
Eric had heard it, too. A kind of clicking somewhere in the darkness out in the