Felidae - Special U.S. Edition

of the remaining six hundred. Since our average life expectancy spans nine to fifteen years on a human time scale, and those six hundred represented a solid cross section of ages, we proceeded from the assumption that about one hundred of them must have died of old age or of illnesses caused by old age—this without attracting the attention of anyone, because they had most likely been buried immediately by their owners. Pascal, of course, had kept additional accounts of the average mortality rates in the district, yet since in these cases the causes of death were all known, they did not have any logical connection with the hundreds of deaths we supposed had taken place. Given such a great number of missing, we also had to allow for a percentage of unknowns, because a certain percentage had simply disappeared into thin air, for reasons that we could not pin down. This diffuse area included, for example, the theft of purebreds and the victims of traffic accidents whom attentive observers had promptly laid to eternal rest in the nearest available garbage can. We made a generous estimate of these unknown figures at 10 percent, which meant that of the remaining five hundred there were fifty missing-in-action candidates.

Two hundred plus 100 plus 50 makes 350. We now knew that 350 of the 800 listed as having vanished without a trace were not murder victims. The approximate number of brothers and sisters that had met with a terrible death by super-fang's deadly bites in the past seven years thus numbered about 450 by simple arithmetic. Nevertheless, we continued our calculations. If the butcher had set to work with uninterrupted regularity, then the number of Felidae he had dispatched to the eternal happy hunting grounds amounted to 6,428 annually, 535 monthly, and 133 weekly. Statistically, about every five days he had sent a brother or sister to kingdom come. But this figure did not conform to what had actually happened in the last two to three weeks, for even if the many inaccuracies were taken into account, now the killer seemed to be managing nearly twice as many victims and was striking every two to three days.

These feats of computation were, of course, ultimately nothing more than mere speculation, statistical illusion making, number games flickering on the monitor of the computer (which we would pounce on every time Pascal's master walked out the door). But there was no question that we were not making any gross errors if only because in the underground temple there were many hundreds of skeletons, as I had seen with my own eyes. Our methods were very likely bringing us far closer to the truth than we had supposed. On the other hand, we were as far as ever from finding a convincing murder motive.

The path to halfway realistic results was beset with nerve-wracking attention to detail. Bluebeard interviewed numerous district residents, tracked down family members and friends of the missing, and grilled all of them about what the missing had said before disappearing, thus providing the information we needed for our computer chronology. Without Bluebeard, we certainly could not have put together a list of such size in such a short time.

But aside from the drudgery, Pascal introduced me step by step to the secrets of computers, opening the door for me to a fascinating universe full of playful logic and logical play. The data management program alone, which reduced half the work of compiling statistics, enthralled me so much that I taught myself—with an occasional tip from Pascal—how to operate it within a day. It was Pascal, too, who taught me how to install secret files. These could be displayed on the monitor only after activating a personal code so that their existence remained a secret even to the owner of the computer. Yet I wanted more, having at last discovered a way to gratify my perversely restless mind, condemned to inactivity most of the time, with intellectual fodder. The power to create a simulation of reality with a few keystrokes or to penetrate the realm of abstraction and knowledge was such a turn-on that I became addicted from the start. I would repeatedly turn to Pascal during our work and beg him to give me even more dope. He told me about the many existing computer languages with names like Basic, Fortran, Cobol, Ada, and, oddly enough, even Pascal. He wanted to teach me one of these languages when the hunt for the murderer was over so that I could write my own programs.

All of these promises, delivered with an encouraging smile and shining eyes, touched a soft spot somewhere in me, because they reminded me automatically of the brief time left to my teacher. There were many daring, intellectual feats for us to perform and many dark mysteries for us to unravel if only these devilish tumors did not dwell in his bowels, growing and growing and growing, while we spent the whole time indulging ourselves with childish dreams. The pain that jabbed at my heart when I convinced him to rave about the marvelous things he planned to teach me finally became so unbearable that I avoided every allusion to a joint future and steered the conversation toward our pressing problems. In this atmosphere of uncertainty and wild fantasizing, we slaved at the computer for days on end and, when Karl Lagerfeld didn't come home, all night long. I was pulled back and forth between the successes we celebrated, yowling at our feeding dish, and the sadness that tormented me, knowing what would happen soon to my dear friend. And so the shadow of death fell on every exclamation of joy, on every smile, on every crest of happiness. Admittedly, death was still far away and only its shadowy outline recognizable. But you could already see the blood-red glow of his eyes.

We took only a few breaks, during which Bluebeard gave us new information or entertained us with the latest gossip in the