It was just like Kong that his first move was to announce his modus operandi loud and clear.
"God help you!" he bellowed out. "God help you! If you have ever felt pain, then that pain, compared with what now awaits you, will seem like an itch! I will rip off your head and shit down your neck! I will tear out your heart and play Ping-Pong with it! I will …"
The preliminary announcement of these future pleasures had its effect: the stranger took to his heels and ran in his strangely waddling gait to the opposite wall. Kong and his retinue immediately shot after him, while several bolts of lightning flashed in the sky as if to dramatize the scene.
I wanted to call after them not to act too hastily, that maybe the stranger, as we had, only stumbled across the corpse as a chance witness, that we should first submit him to an interrogation, and that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. At the same time, I realized how ridiculous these appeals were. It was as absurd as if you were telling a stampeding herd of horses to pay attention to traffic signs. So I had no other course of action but to track down both the hunters and their prey to prevent at least the worst from happening.
From a distance, the waddler looked like a neglected, gray-haired Persian, or if not that, then a mongrel with Persian blood. He was astonishingly nimble. Running nonstop, at the end of the yard he sprang in a flowing motion up on the garden wall like a jumbo jet smoothly taking off. Once above, he risked a hasty, strangely detached look back at his pursuers, who were loping up to the wall as if they were storming the Alamo. A gigantic bolt of lightning, followed by an earsplitting roar, again lit up the scene, and I could see his face for the first time. He didn't seem to understand what the hunt was all about, and knit his brow several times nervously. He was really taken aback, yet made no efforts at all to yell out anything in his defense to his pursuers, or to plead for their mercy. Evidently he felt no fear, but instead a deep irritation. His facial expression showed him to be distracted, and this, along with his strange behavior, made him seem a very strange character indeed.
He jumped down from the wall into the neighboring garden and vanished from our sight. When Kong, Herrmann and Herrmann, and, after a few seconds, my humble self, finally reached the wall, we were just in time to see that our suspect had already climbed up the wall facing us and was coolly preparing to spring down from it into the next garden. So we had to do it all over again. We followed His Oddness, crossing the garden and mounting the wall.
He was gone! He had disappeared into thin air, had long ago departed for the Yellow Submarine Land from which he may well have come. What we now set eyes on was only a mirror image of the previous scene. Once again a garden, once again walls meeting at right angles, once again a tangled landscape of bare trees, dead flower beds, garden furniture tossed about, indefinable garage junk, and the obligatory, forlorn-looking grill.
Kong stewed it over, and like all the thinking processes in his simple psyche, you could see the intellectual effort written large on his face. He would have made a terrific teacher for deaf-mutes. He turned to me.
"Any idea where the bastard's hiding out, smarty-pants?"
He was asking me for my opinion! What an honor! What a blessing! The guy had wholly forgotten that only a few minutes ago he had wanted to put me on a hook, quarter me, and run me through a meat grinder.
"No," I confessed. "With this foul weather and hellish gloom, I don't even know where my own house is anymore."
"He moved on for sure, Boss," suggested the Herrmann with the eternal grin. "It's sure as shit that he's already over the next wall and moving on. There are just three gardens left and that's the end of the line. Right where the district tapers off is where we can nab him!"
Kong conjured up an enthusiastic smile on his face. Simple solutions fascinated him.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," he panted. "Okay, boys, let's go!"
The Three Musketeers scooted down the wall, rushed across the garden, mounted the next wall, and were then lost to sight. As far as I was concerned, for today I was fed up with nocturnal games of hares and hounds, miraculously appearing cadavers, and alleged murderers. Maybe it was my duty to stick around when they captured that oddball just so they wouldn't lynch him on the spot. But my previous efforts had pooped me out so much already that I was beginning to stagger around. No matter how guilty I felt, I was going to have to pass on this one.
All at once the Persian popped up! I could hardly believe my eyes. But I saw him squeeze himself, groaning, through a hole caused by
