dump, and they both turned around, trying in vain to see something. A long way off the lights from the hovels of the Garbage Town could be glimpsed like a will-o’-the-wisp in the blackness, but otherwise the dump was concealed by the night. To be on the safe side, the hyena lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper as he continued.
He hadn’t connected the clothing deliveries with the Cleaners. There was no reason to make such a connection. But that Ruth took in the clothes on her own had aroused his curiosity, and he decided to find out why she didn’t let anyone else do the job.
This proved to be more difficult than he’d thought. Rat Ruth met the courier, wrote a receipt for the delivery, and took the packing slips back to her room while the clothes were being unloaded. There was no possibility of ferreting out anything at all. On a single occasion Bataille managed to catch a glimpse of Rat sitting in her room, bowed over a massive binder where she apparently stored the papers having to do with the clothes. But why she, who otherwise preferred to sleep through the days, always remained awake for this delivery, remained a mystery. It certainly had nothing to do with Rat’s interest in clothes.
Bataille understood that the answers to his questions were in the binders that Ruth stored in her bedroom. Bataille didn’t relate to Eric Bear exactly how he’d managed to worm his way into the queen’s bedroom, but after a long period of purposeful efforts he’d finally gotten a friendly invitation.
The hyena leaned across the three-legged table and in a whisper described the scene with great care. How the queen rat had lain down on her back on the bed after they’d shared a bottle of calvados and was soon snoring audibly while Bataille snooped around in the room, which was filled to the brim with the rat’s valuables. That is to say, things that the rat considered valuable, which could be a diamond necklace or a half-eaten package of alphabet cookies. Bataille sneaked around, lifting up piles of clothes, rummaging through piles of papers and books that had to do with the administration of the Garbage Dump. He searched through clothes closets, which apparently functioned as some type of pantry. The binders were nowhere.
At regular intervals the rat sighed or moaned from the bed. Each time, the hyena was forced to break off his search and make certain she’d fallen asleep again before he could continue. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if she realized that he’d fooled her.
Finally he found her hiding place. Under a pair of loose floorboards by the window closest to the bed. But he’d only managed to start leafing through the binder when the rat awoke with a jerk. Bataille threw aside the binder and poked the loose floorboards back with his foot. All he’d seen were pages filled with handwritten columns of names, dates, and the type of garments that had been donated.
It took almost half a year before he got a chance to inspect the binder a second time.
“But, you understand,” said Bataille and the icy cold in his eye glistened yet again in the light from the stars, “I am made of time.”
Eric nodded as though he understood what the hyena meant.
The next time it had gone better. Bataille had immediately gone to the hiding place by the window and so had significantly more time. What he’d thought was a single binder proved to be an entire little library. Lists of names, clothes, and dates. Page after page. The hyena didn’t know what he was looking for, he mostly sat and leafed through it at random in order to discover a pattern. He believed that he was looking for some kind of code when his glance fell on the name Kohl. Kohl had donated a shirt and a pair of pants. The date that stood next to the clothes was a little more than a year old. Bataille thought about it and realized that Kohl must have donated clothes right before the Cleaners had been up in Kohl’s apartment.
He started searching for more familiar names. And there they were. One by one he ran across them. The animals in whose homes he and the Cleaners had been those past months, the animals who had been picked up by the Chauffeurs the day before.
It was asserted that all of them had donated clothing on their dying