The monster sneered and turned to go. But what that pathetic creature did couldn't be called walking. It was more like a fascinating mixture of hobbling and staggering that he had perfected into an athletic discipline.
"Who gives a damn!" he shouted defiantly, and staggered and hobbled over the next garden wall, most likely in the direction of the nearest home for the physically disabled. After his first few steps, however, he stopped in his tracks, turned, and leaned down toward me.
"What do people call you, wiseass?" he asked, maintaining his cool air of unconcern.
"Francis," I replied.
2
The following week was gloomy. The depression that came with the move hit me like a steam press and paralyzed my brain. I descended into a dark valley of woe, and everything that got through to me had to suffer its way through a murky cloud of melancholia first. What did seep through gave me little reason to cheer up.
Possessed by a destructive demon, Gustav carried out his threat and really did begin renovating. His first move was to rip up the rotting parquet floor and throw the refuse into a container in front of the house that he had rented for this purpose. He had actually gotten the idea into his head of laying a new parquet floor! I'm not joking. It was roughly like a deaf-mute auditioning to replace the moderator of a talk show. To make a long story short, Gustav didn't pull it off. He didn't accomplish much after his daring feat of demolition: he bought an exorbitantly expensive book on floor laying, panicked when he saw how complicated the work was, and decided for the time being to merrily carry on his slum clearance holocaust. I was beginning to be afraid that, deluded as he was, the maniac would tear the whole house apart.
Finally, just what I could have predicted to him at the beginning came true: he had to admit to himself that he couldn't manage a renovation job of such proportions. This was not only annoying but also, as usual for Gustav, tragic. In the night, I could hear my mentally deficient friend weeping quietly to himself in the army cot he had set up provisionally in the living room.
I, too, was on the brink of tears, for the shock of seeing a murdered brother in my new neighborhood had not exactly made it easy for me to make myself at home. Yet I decided to take a look around anyway. After the monster disappeared, whose real name I still didn't know, I inspected the corpse and the scene of the crime with a little more care.
One thing was sure: there hadn't been much of a fight. True, the victim had put up a strong defense, to which the scuffed-up earth and bent blades of grass around the lifeless body attested, but only when he had already felt claws ripping deep into his fur and neck. From this I deduced that the victim must have known his butcher well, so well that he must even have felt free to turn his back on him. After the surprise of the lethal bite, there had been some desperate resistance, perhaps even a little brawl, over within a few seconds, with the helpless victim twitching on the ground.
Something else struck my attention: at the time of death, the victim had been about to follow what is so poetically termed "the call of the wild." Since he had not been a member of that convivial club of the happily castrated, which was itself a wonder, considering that the middle-class neighborhood was so prim and proper, the scent of the wide, wide world of lust still clung to him. He had also left behind his pungent signatures here and there in the garden, providing testimony to the fact that he had not been able to restrain himself from engaging in a little amorous play before his murder. I gave his genitals a brief sniff. It confirmed what I had suspected. He had just attained the peak of his sexual excitement.
Had he had a rendezvous with some beauty? Was she the last to admire this "stud" while he was still alive, or was she the one who gave him the kiss of death that transformed him into a "cold sack," as the monster put it in his straightforward way? Considering the flaky behavior and limitless aggression our angelic sisters show after a lovers' tryst, that would hardly have surprised me.3 But it was still too early to draw any conclusions before more details were known on the three other corpses that that crippled John Wayne look-alike had so generously mentioned.
A day later, Gustav discovered the corpse, which had already begun to stink terribly, made a great many infantile declarations of grief, and then buried the body on the spot where he found it.
But what did I care about this Raymond Chandler crap, about this Jack the Ripper who produced one "cold sack" after the other? Didn't I have enough problems? In the next room my companion was weeping over his inability to decipher the cryptography of a 128-dollar manual on the art of laying a floor; and as far as I was concerned, I had more than enough to do fighting off fits of depression in this filthy hole of an apartment.
Yet, as always in life, after a while everything got straightened out. It got straightened out in a nerve-wracking way, but it got straightened out. As always in Gustav's crises, rescue came in the person of Archie.
Archibald Philip Purpur is, as he likes to call himself and as others like to call him, an optimist. Although a tiny pinch of pessimism wouldn't do this magnanimous man any harm, Archie can't and simply won't be a child
