"Why was he called Deep Purple?"
"That's just it. His owner is his exact opposite. He baptized good old Deep Purple Deep Purple because the owner thought he himself was some kind of screwy Deep Purple. He's sort of an Easy Rider of the middle-class salary group. As soon as he leaves work, he throws on this heavy leather getup, plays one of these weird Black Sabbath oldies, tattoos a skull and crossbones on his ass, kicks in his own window with his king-size leather boots, throws empty beer cans at people's heads, and, when he's finally calmed down after doing all that, rolls himself one mellow joint after another and gets wrecked until he blacks out."
"What does he do for a living?"
"Post office official."
"That makes a lot of sense."
For the grand finale of my general cleanup, I licked my front paws one after the other until they were moist, then rubbed them over my face and ears. After all, dealing with a case as muddled as this meant I had to at least keep my head clean.
"Sure, man. That can opener never did have all his marbles. Anyway, Purple always got really grossed out whenever he saw old, graying Dennis Hopper, even if he was a mile away. He didn't exactly conform to Purple's idea of good behavior. But what choice did he have? You can't pick out your own can opener, can you? And seeing both of them together was a real horror show. On the one hand, there you had Deep Purple, the model of respectability, vigilant around the clock that nobody leave behind any stinking piss pool on his turf. From morning to night he was on the brink of a nervous breakdown because that Born to Be Wild joker never could get used to the idea of regular feeding times, and because today's youth doesn't stick to our traditional greeting rules. On the other hand, there was his freaky owner, who already has a shattered eardrum because he listened to the new Mötley Crüe CD with earphones with the volume all the way up."
"Let me ask you a question. Was Deep Purple castrated?"
"Purple? Castrated? Man, that freak would sooner have become a dyed-in-the-wool Frank Sinatra fan than have his little darling castrated. But Purple never got into fun and games. Like I said, he was about as old as Methuselah, only he looked a lot older."
He stood up, turned his back to me, and, lost in thought, looked up at the sky through the filmy window of the balcony door.
"Strange," he said sadly. "Now I feel sorry for the two of them. Although there couldn't have been a greater difference between that uptight square and that phony heavy-metal jerk, they must have liked each other some way or other, seeing as they'd been together so long. Yeah, they were the odd couple, Deep Purple and the post office official. What's this can opener going to do now without Purple? Is he going to find himself a new housemate? And what kind of name is he going to give him? Judas Priest?"
I had an uneasy suspicion about Deep Purple's identity. After I had finally finished cleaning myself, I turned to the monster, whose unexpected talkativeness had come to an end.
"Where's Deep Purple's corpse now?"
"In Peter Fonda's garage. Do you want to go on with your clever investigation?"
"If you have nothing against it. How about showing me where it is?"
"Why not," he said, yawning, his inimitable coolness having since returned, as if the preceding fit of melancholy had been a sign of weakness that now had to be concealed under a cloak of silence. He turned to go, but before he could quite get into gear, I caught up with him with a quick leap and looked deep down into his one uninjured eye, the eye that sparkled all the more brightly because it was the only one he had left.
"You never did tell me your name, wiseass," I said. He smiled wearily, then brushed lightly past me out the balcony door.
"Bluebeard," he said outside. "But don't ask me now who my can opener is, otherwise I'll be the one who'll have to puke."
I followed my limping monarch out onto the balcony, and then from there down to the terrace with a big leap. Fall had made considerable advances in the last few days, coating the picturesque garden with a morbid sheen. Like an invisible vampire, it had sucked all the green out of the trees and other vegetation, turning them into yellowish-brown, bloodless ruins. The sky was overcast with threatening, lead-colored clouds, between which the setting sun cast a few pale, reddish bars of light on our gentle, tranquil neighborhood. A fresh wind had come up, swirling the dead heaps of dry fallen leaves over the precisely mown lawns, between the gaps in the rotting garden sheds, and into the artificial ponds. There could be no doubt: everything seemed to be making preparations for the big death, for the deep sleep from which there would hopefully be an awakening again.
Now we were strolling along the winding network of walls that separated the innumerable gardens from one another and that from a bird's-eye view must have looked like an intricate labyrinth. Bluebeard was having trouble hobbling along in front of me, like one of those absurd contraptions you can get in novelty stores that do nothing but perform funny-looking motions. His tailless rear was in full view, and I could witness for myself the splendor of his virility swinging perkily back and forth between his thighs. It was almost a miracle that his family jewels had not been
