All my speculations about the murders were now unexpectedly disproved, the way a carefully built house of cards collapses through one single careless motion. The corpse was not male, but female. At the time of her murder she had not been in heat, but pregnant. She was no "standard," no member of the gigantic family of European Shorthairs, but was of fine extraction. The only recognizable common feature between this and the other murders was possibly their abysmal absurdity. Only a lunatic, a psychopath running around amok could come into question for such an atrocity. It was impossible to find a "rational" murder motive in the face of this arbitrary butchering.
The bright glow of the lightning went out, and deep darkness once again enveloped the Balinese. Nevertheless, since I now knew where she lay, I could make out her form. But she had now turned into a shadowy creature without that horrifying emanation that she had had in the harsh light of the lightning. I was so petrified that I couldn't even twitch an ear. While I stared down at the corpse, unable to look away, as if it were a long-awaited divine manifestation, the rain beat down on me to its heart's content. It felt like needles piercing my insides through the pores of my skin. A violent trembling seized my body that might have been an initial symptom of pneumonia.
"Well, well, what do you know? The little runt ran out of breath. Probably been stuffing himself with too much junk food." Kong, panting, stood on the wall and looked down on me, grinning triumphantly. Herrmann and Herrmann joined him quickly from behind and imitated his silly grin. They didn't seem to have noticed my find.
"Yes," I said sadly. "I'm out of breath. But apparently I'm not the only one."
"What are you babbling about?"
Kong jumped down from the wall and landed right on the spot beside me. Both of his lackeys followed him. Continuing to smile, he scrutinized me a while from the side. And then his gaze fell on the corpse and all of a sudden his expression of scorn turned into sheer horror. His eyes widened as if they were about to pop out, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. Even Herrmann and Herrmann were affected deeply, something I would never have expected from them.
"Solitaire!" came at long last from Kong, and he began to howl with all his might. "Oh Solitaire! Solitaire! Whatever have they done to you? My dear, sweet, beautiful Solitaire! My God, whatever have they done to you? Oh Solitaire!"
He screamed and sobbed and sniffed at the corpse, he hopped around madly like a rain-dancing Indian, he tore up pawfuls of grass from the lawn. Like all the stirrings of his heart, Kong's grief was of gigantic dimensions. The enormous beast practically wore himself out until finally he threw himself down on Solitaire's lifeless body and licked her rain-drenched coat, whimpering.
"Who was she?" I asked the cross-eyed Herrmann at my side. He turned his ornery mug away from the entwined couple and looked at me so downheartedly and distractedly that you'd have thought I'd never been the one to have tattooed the cute souvenir in his flank just a few minutes ago.
"Solitaire was the boss's main squeeze. And what she was expecting probably was his, too," he answered curtly.
It was something new, seeing this trio of out-and-out aggressors so desolate. They harmonized with each other so well that each of them shared the sentiments and thoughts of the other with equal intensity. To cap things off, Herrmann and Herrmann had begun to howl in solidarity with their master.
But Kong gradually regained his composure, and the old, incorrigible skunk that was in him returned with even more drastic force. He puffed himself up mightily into his now familiar, awe-inspiring manner and exploded.
"I'll kill him!" he roared so loudly that he drowned out the thunder god's symphony. "I'll make hamburger out of him and cook his innards in a microwave oven! I'll bite out his throat and swig his blood! I'll rip out his balls and make him eat them. I'll, I'll …" He was screaming so much that he could hardly get any air and coughed up snot and some clumps of undigested food. Then he continued to roar, disregarding the disgusting interruption.
"What heartless creature did this? Who? Was it you?"
He gave me a half-insane look, but then shook his head in disbelief. That sure was a load off my mind.
"No, it couldn't have been you. You couldn't have done it. You're too inept to have done this. Besides, you didn't have enough time. But who was it then? Who? Oh …"
All at once his unbridled rage fell away from him. Deeply grieved, he once again regarded his beloved. His emotional life seemed to consist of floods of feeling that surged up only to recede as abruptly as they had come. Poor Kong—I really pitied him now—was like a little child who could no longer control his behavior; he would have fits from one moment to the next. Herrmann and Herrmann cautiously approached him to console him in his hour of need. In the end, the three companions had their heads together and sobbed softly over Solitaire's corpse.
Suddenly there was a rustling sound as if something were writhing in the branches of the shrubbery. We all heard it at the same time and pricked up our ears. Although the storm furnished a continual background of rain that made it hard to hear more subdued sounds, the rustling was clearly audible. Someone had to be in very close proximity.
Instantly an electric charge seemed to pulse through Kong, and he raised his head
