Chapter 12
Snake Marek returned a few hours after Dove had taken off. He acted as if nothing special had happened. Eric was sitting, bandaged, at the kitchen table; Sam was fixing the dinner that Crow had bought.
“Snake,” said Crow, “you know what, I…”
But Eric silenced him. He invited Snake to take a seat at the table. All four ate in silence and, over coffee, began discussing how they should go from there. After an hour or two they were in agreement. Snake’s theory was simple. If the Chauffeurs didn’t operate arbitrarily, there must be some form of communication between them and their employer. Instead of searching for the list, which demonstrably didn’t exist, the snake, bear, gazelle, and crow should try to find out how this information reached Hotel Esplanade.
Sam had no difficulty arranging a wiretap. Technology was one of his foremost interests and in the cellar at Yiala’s Arch he had an entire workshop. Exactly how the gazelle made use of his tools and equipment in his “work” remained unclear. Without difficulty he located the telephone cables which led to Hotel Esplanade, and in a childishly simple way he jury-rigged them so that calls to and from the hotel were routed to a tape recorder up in Sam’s apartment.
It seemed unlikely, however, that anyone gave the Chauffeurs orders over the telephone. The risk of misunderstandings and eavesdropping would be far too great. And because there was no longer any postal delivery in Yok, the stuffed animals felt the possibility that the list was delivered by a courier most likely. This led to a decision to intensify the surveillance of the hotel. If the precision of their approach had been a little slapdash before, Eric now created a schedule without gaps. No one was particularly happy about the increased guard duty, but they all understood that it was needed. During the lonely hours of the night, Sam Gazelle used pills in a way that took a heavy toll on his hiding places and supplies. Eric brooded and agonized, thinking about—longing for—Emma Rabbit. Snake devoted the time to intellectual nonsense and soul-searching; a soul-searching which in the aftermath of the night appeared even more nonsensical than the nonsense itself. Tom-Tom Crow was, however, the one who was most tormented by sitting hour after hour, staring at the hotel’s dark brick fa?ade where nothing happened from the time the red pickup left the building a few minutes after sundown until it returned a few minutes before dawn.
Tom-Tom was a simple soul, but he didn’t like being alone. He didn’t like it at all.
Over the years he had learned to distract the loneliness through a series of empty rituals. He cooked, cleaned, even watched TV according to certain definite patterns. Patterns that demanded discipline. The ambitious handiwork projects were part of that. It was a matter of taming the silence and the loneliness. When evening was over, sleep came as quickly as a sharp right hook.
And he never needed to recall what had happened.
But in the gray Volga, he remembered. There was nothing else to do.
He recalled how cramped it was. How it rubbed against his wings, and how the light filtered down through the cracks in the floor.
He remembered the pain. The terror.
Tom-Tom stared intensely at the fa?ade across the way, at Hotel Esplanade, trying to blot out the unpleasant thoughts by looking even more intensely.
But he was a simple soul.
He needed distractions.
And nothing was happening outside Hotel Esplanade.
He believed that the attacks were for real, all the way up to school age. It was only Papa who could hear the warning sirens, and certainly that was strange, but why should Papa lie? Papa was all Tom-Tom had. Mama had disappeared even before he was delivered. Tom-Tom was Papa’s only child.
They were coming from the forests, Papa said. They tortured stuffed animals. They could keep at it for days. When you finally died, said Papa, you could feel content. But Tom-Tom shouldn’t be afraid. Papa would never let anything happen to him. That was why they had to practice.
There were a couple of loose floor planks in the kitchen. When Papa heard the sirens, Tom-Tom should run into the kitchen and throw himself down into the hollow place under the floor. But because it was only Papa who heard the sirens, Tom-Tom never knew when it was time. No matter how hard the punishment Papa gave him, Tom-Tom never learned to hear the sirens. The sirens in Papa’s head.
It was cramped under the planks in the kitchen. There was hardly room for Tom-Tom. Perhaps that was just as well. The idea of the practice was that he was forced to lie silent as long as possible. If he let out a peep, the enemy would find him. Then the enemy would tear up the planks and torture him. It was for Tom-Tom’s own good.
He learned to lie silently for hours.
Tom-Tom Crow stared at Hotel Esplanade, trying to think about Snake, the bear, and the gazelle. He tried to take himself back to reality and the gray Volga and the terrible Chauffeurs on the other side of the street. But after a few minutes, he was down in the cramped space under the floor again.
The pain.
What if the enemy sensed something anyway?
What if the enemy sensed something anyway and started searching for a hiding place somewhere under the floor planks? What if the enemy, for example, poured boiling water over the floor, boiling water that ran down through the cracks? Would Tom-Tom still manage to keep silent? Boiling oil? Melted sugar? Tom-Tom’s papa was inventive at the stove. He was doing this for Tom-Tom’s own good.
The pain.
When dawn came and the first rays of the sun were climbing up over the horizon, the night of watching was over. Most often, the red pickup drove into the garage an hour or two before sunrise; sometimes the margin was narrower. The Chauffeurs would sleep through the day after completion of nightly duty, and that applied to Eric, Sam, Snake, and Tom-Tom as well. But no one found as great a relief in the hour of dawn as the crow.
During the shift that proved to be the last one outside Hotel Esplanade for the stuffed animals, Sam Gazelle overslept.
It wasn’t at all strange; chock-full of interacting and counteracting substances flowing around in his system, the chances of his remaining awake for an entire surveillance shift were generally nonexistent.
Instead of soundlessly opening the car door and nonchalantly strolling back to the beautifully grass-green Yiala’s Arch as dawn was breaking, Sam threw open his eyes in surprise and noticed that the day had begun. The Morning Weather had turned cloudy, nothing more, but this would still demand an explanation. Eric would understand that Sam had fallen asleep, and Sam had no excuse.
He wriggled out of the car at the same time as he tried to gather his thoughts. The ghosts of his nightmares had not yet dissipated, and they made it hard for him to produce miserable white lies.
He shut the car door and took a deep breath. There were a few cigarette butts on the sidewalk right next to him, and only a year ago he would have leaned down and picked them up. Somewhere in the vicinity he heard the sound of an iron grate being rolled up as a shop owner came to work. And Sam was just on his way to begin the stroll homeward when the concealed garage door to Hotel Esplanade unexpectedly opened.
Despite the fact that the sun had gone up and the day had begun.
From out of the garage drove not a red, but a green pickup.