I expected him to notice me soon and launch a major offensive, no doubt because his great-grandfather had once taken a crap on this very terrace, or because he had already received special permission from the Supreme Court in a 1965 landmark case to gaze down at this wonderful garden from where he was sitting every damn day from three to four in the afternoon. The brothers could be a real pain in the ass.
I decided to take the risk. Did I have another choice?
As if he were some sort of living radar, he swiveled around just as I was thinking all this through, and stared at me—except "staring" wouldn't be quite right, because he had only one eye; apparently the other had fallen victim to a screwdriver, or been lost in illness. Where once his left eye had been there was now a shriveled, rose-red cavity of flesh that had become uglier with the passage of time. And what is more, the entire left side of his face sagged, probably because of partial paralysis. But this did not prevent him from posing a threat. It was clear that utmost caution was advised.
After he had looked me over from top to bottom without showing any emotion, he surprised me by turning his head away to look down at the garden again.
Since I am so courteous, I decided to introduce myself to this pathetic stranger in the hope of coaxing more details about my new surroundings from him.
I sprang down from the windowsill to the balcony and from there to the terrace. Slowly, and with an affected nonchalance, I strolled up to him, almost as if we had once put each other's eyes out in a sandbox fight. He took note of me with sovereign composure, not once interrupting his garden meditation to deign to look at me. Then I stood beside him and risked a sideways glance. At close range, the impression he had made on me from a distance was raised, let's say, to the thirty-fourth power. In comparison to this maltreated creature, even Quasimodo would have had a realistic chance of becoming a male model. As if what I had witnessed had not already been enough for my sadly abused eyes, they then had to register that his right front paw had been mutilated. Nevertheless, he seemed to suffer his abysmal crippling with a calm so stoic and profound that it might have been nothing worse than hay fever.
Apparently, these diverse disfigurements included some inside his head, for although I had now already stood beside him for more than a minute, he paid me not the slightest attention, choosing instead to continue staring down. Really supercool. I obliged him by lowering my own gaze to locate the spot in the garden that had cast such a persuasive spell on my confrere.
What I saw there was, so to speak, my welcoming present. Under the tall tree, half-covered by shrubbery, lay a black brother with all his limbs stretched out. Only he wasn't sleeping. I could hardly imagine that he would ever engage in any activity again, whether active or passive. He was, as people of lesser finesse might say, as dead as a doornail. More specifically, this was a member of my species whose corpse was already in an advanced stage of putrefaction. All his blood had gushed from his neck, which had been torn completely into shreds, and formed a large pool that was now a dry stain. Excited flies circled over him like vultures over slaughtered cattle.
The sight was a shock, but my sensitivities had been considerably blunted by everything I had already endured that day. 1 now cursed Gustav under my breath for the thousandth time for having dragged me into this neighborhood of murder and bedlam. I was stunned, and hoped that this was all a dream, or at the very least one of those ingenious, animated films they sometimes make about my kind.
"Can opener!" the monster beside me suddenly bellowed in a voice as deformed as his whole appearance. It sounded like all the people in the world who had ever dubbed every one of John Wayne's movies had crackled in unison.
Can opener, hm ... Well, what was I supposed to say in return, not being a monster like he and not understanding his language?
"Can opener?" I asked, "What do you mean by that?"
"Just that it was one of those damned can openers. They did it, man. They fit out little Sascha with a special valve in his neck."
Associations spun through my mind. I tried to imagine how this would be connected to a can opener—a difficult task, considering the stinking corpse below and the even stronger stench of the half-dead freak at my side. Then I realized what he meant.
"You mean humans? Humans killed him?"
"Sure”, growled John Wayne. "It was those fucking can openers”.
"Did you see it?"
"Shit no!"
Anger and annoyance flashed across his face. Something seemed to make him lose his cool.
"Who else, except for a low-down can opener, would have done something like this? Nothing but a low-down, no-good can opener, good for nothing but opening up cans for us! Shit yes!
He had hit his stride.
"This is the fourth cold sack already”.
"You mean, what's down there is already the fourth corpse?"
"Guess you're new around here, huh?"
He roared with laughter, perfectly cool again.
"You moving into that garbage dump? Nice little place. There's where I always go to take a leak."
Ignoring his laughter, which turned into a guffaw, I sprang down from the terrace to the garden and approached the corpse. The scene was both shocking and sad. I examined the fist-sized puncture in the neck of the deceased and sniffed at it. Then I turned around to face the joker on the terrace.
"It wasn't a can opener,” I said. "If can openers want to bump someone off, they have plenty of
