Late in the evening, Bluebeard and I took our leave of Pascal and started back home in the bitterly cold weather. It had stopped snowing in the meantime, but in its stead a merciless frost had set in.
"You oughta pay more attention to your own ass," grunted Bluebeard while we plodded through the snow on the garden walls.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Well, the way things look, this beast is still running around free, probably holed up somewhere. He ain't farting behind a warm, cozy stove anymore, and he oughta be having a tough time getting his belly full, too. He's gonna want to even the score with the dude who screwed up his plans. Shit yes!"
"I'm not afraid," I lied. "Besides, I'm not the only detective who's hip to his tricks. He has Pascal as much as me to thank for his trouble."
"Nah, he …" Bluebeard's expression froze. "According to what you told me, the killer's only going after the brothers and sisters who wanna take further classes in sex education. But good old Pascal is castrated. And besides, he's not going to be around much longer anyway."
"Why not?"
"He's got cancer, in his gut, I think. The horse doctor gives him not more than half a year."
I had nothing to say to that, and took pains not to reveal that the news hit me like a bullet. It was odd, but I felt as if this shattering, irrevocable judgment had been pronounced on a friend with whom I had grown up, someone I had known since early childhood. Suddenly, I was aware of how intensely I was attached to Pascal and how much I needed him as a companion, indeed, even as a beloved twin brother I could not do without. Yes, we were like twins, not only in matters of intellect but also of taste, a perfectly coordinated duo. And now he was about to make his exit before the good adventures together could even begin. It was stupid of me to forget in the commotion of the murders that death didn't often make violent attacks; no, usually he just stretched out his icy fingers very slowly and quietly toward the living. He was the great silent presence in the background that looked at the clock and smiled.
Bluebeard and I didn't say a single word to each other the rest of the way. The insight, newly rediscovered, that death was present not only in the horrible deeds of the murderer, but everywhere everlastingly had silenced us. I also knew that when Pascal died, something would die in me as well. It had already begun.
9
The following one and a half weeks consisted on the one hand of tricky mental acrobatics, and on the other of addictive pleasures—and ended with an unbelievably bitter surprise that outdid everything preceding it. It was those days before Christmas that smell like home-baked cookies with a sugary icing of powdery snow, and Gustav and Archie had made it their goal to complete all renovation by Christmas Eve. Both were under such a strain that they didn't have any time to pay attention to me, but that was just fine, because at the time I was busy with things that were putting me under a strain.
What Pascal and I had planned to do quickly turned out to be a wearisome sorting out not only of computer data that had piled up over years and years but of the fragmentary memories of district residents. As Pascal had predicted, it was extraordinarily complicated to sift out the "cold sacks" from those who had suddenly vanished, who either had died from natural causes or who had left the district for unknown reasons. In the end we obviously weren't going to make any completely reliable estimates of how many had actually made use of Jesaja's Guardian of the Dead service throughout the years. Nevertheless, we did get closer to the truth with a few tricks of statistical magic, and with a probability of about 80 percent at least. In this regard, Bluebeard was of invaluable assistance, for he took care of the tiresome dirty work. His detailed knowledge of the district and his manifold contacts paid off superbly.
Pascal's data only went back as far as 1982. So at the beginning of our statistical operations we concentrated on everyone who had parted company with the district since early 1982. Already on the fifth day of our investigation, we came up with a "flexible" number of eight hundred missing. These, however, gradually had been replaced by about 350 new arrivals, in part because our kind, as undemanding house pets, were becoming fashionable with the growing number of people these days who shunned responsibility, and in part because all the missing had automatically made room for newcomers. To some extent, Pascal and Bluebeard knew the reasons for the disappearance of about two hundred of these eight hundred never-seen-agains. Either they had moved away with their owners or had said something to the effect that they felt uneasy in the neighborhood or with their owners and were thinking of changing districts; most of them had probably carried out this wish at some point. Then we took a look at the ages
