"Elementary, my dear friend. As corpses, they could never have turned up to begin with. Look, fluctuation is a perpetual fact of life in the district—and so you can very quickly lose track of anyone's whereabouts. Our brothers and sisters who die, I mean who die a natural death, are often buried by their owners in a pet cemetery or somewhere in the family's backyard. Or the owners move and take their little darlings with them. As for the other brothers and sisters, they go wandering off or switch to districts that are farther away, or just vanish from the scene. However these many brothers and sisters of ours may have disappeared, there has never been any reason to suppose that they were murdered. As for the six other murder victims in my data bank, these were found with fatal neck-bite wounds, and so were distinctly identifiable as murder victims. If, however, the murderer had been stowing away his previous victims underground with unflagging diligence, naturally they could hardly have turned up above-ground as corpses and consequently been registered in my data bank."
"Did you note the brothers and sisters who suddenly, for whatever reasons, left the district?"
"Of course."
"So we could use your data to verify, even at this later date, how many had disappeared without reason and their precise time of disappearance?"
"Very likely. It will, however, be no easy task to distinguish the murder victims from those who in fact moved on with their owners, ran away, or died from natural causes."
"It sounds like a lot of work, but this is the only way we can determine the periodicity with which the killer has been going about his business, and more important, when the reign of terror actually began. And, of course, there's the next unresolved question, namely why the killer didn't deliver his last seven victims to Jesaja, the good Guardian of the Dead."
Groaning, Pascal got up from his cushion and made a halfhearted attempt at arching his back, all the while smiling in embarrassment, as if he owed me this gesture to offset the picture of misery he presented. It was depressing to see how he sought to hide from me his weary struggle with arthritis and the degeneration of his limbs. Most likely all his other bodily functions were no longer what they used to be. He slid down from the cushion and walked slowly up and down the room.
"That last question does indeed raise an important point, Francis. For it is a sign that our friend is beginning to make mistakes."
"Are you so sure about that? Such an assumption has one very large flaw, in my opinion, because I cannot imagine that this prodigy of horror would be able to commit even a single error."
"But it's the only possible explanation for his changed behavior."
Now you could practically see how enthusiastic he was about juggling around ideas and deductions—it was as necessary to his extraordinary mind as air to breathing, and it really had him in its grip. He spoke more and more fervently, and even his movements became faster, livelier.
"So let's assume I'm the murderer," he said. "I go out regularly on nightly raids to murder others of my kind for motives known only to the Good Lord and myself. I murder and murder, and always cover my tracks by taking hold of the corpses between my teeth, lugging them to the air shafts, and throwing them down into the catacombs. And then, out of the blue, I give up this method, which means that sooner or later someone will find the evidence of my dastardly deeds and hunt me down. Why do I do this? Why do I do something that can only bring me into danger? Well, let's just say that I'm sick and tired of it all. Why go to great lengths to cover my tracks when I know that clearly none of the blockheads in the district are capable of laying a hand on me?"
"Wrong!" I shouted. I loved this guesswork; it thrilled my mind, addicted as it was to puzzles. It made me tingle with excitement, galvanizing a chain reaction of possible solutions.
"You're forgetting that our friend is logic personified. He has a very definite goal in mind with his atrocities, which he commits with the deliberation of a military strategian. Never would it occur to him to deviate even one iota from his normal course of action on a whim or out of arrogance. Why should he? He's been getting along just fine up to now. No, no, he has a special reason for not going on with his clever strategy. But what the devil could it be?"
Pascal froze abruptly in the focal point of one of the lights, surrounding his shimmering dark coat with an aura that made him look like an angel descended from heaven. He jerked his head in my direction and gave me a piercing look with his glowing yellow eyes.
"Perhaps he wants to call our attention to something."
"That's good. That's damned good," I cried in delight and jumped up.
Pascal, however, shook his head vehemently and let his ears droop down unhappily.
"No, that's not good at all. For we have no idea whatsoever what he wants to call our attention to."
"I think it's as plain as the nose in your face: he wants to call our attention to him and to what he's doing, to the fact that he's like a phantom, no, like a god, who can determine the fate of the entire district and decide who shall live and who shall die. Respect—that's what he wants."
"But what's in it for him? The average intelligence of the locals is so disgracefully low that they couldn't possibly understand his oh-so-very-subtle signals; they would lynch him on the spot if he were to reveal himself He can only reap fear and hate here with such tactics, certainly not respect."
I
