While Pascal presented these points in a manner both businesslike and intelligible to all, it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop; everyone was listening to him with a concentration I wouldn't have thought possible. After an initial round of whispered commentary with Herrmann and Herrmann, even Kong was spellbound by Pascal's analysis of the horror, and didn't have a word to say, probably for the first time in his hoodlum existence. Before Pascal asked me to speak, he impressed upon us the necessity of dispensing entirely with nightly strolls for the time being, and of exercising reserve in sexual matters, although many of those present, as he himself knew very well, would find this an unreasonable demand.
"Dear friends, my name is Francis," I began my speech. "I moved to the district only a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, I have already found out a considerable number of important things whose existence you probably never suspected. For example, in this very building experiments were performed on animals in 1980, during which unimaginable crimes were committed against our kind. Some of you yourselves are the victims of these crimes without even being aware of it, because at the time you were still in your infancy and no longer remember what actually happened. Unfortunately, however, the truth is this: all the maimed among you fell victim to the insidious intrigues of human beings and are invalids as the result of these animal experiments!"
A wave of groans and moans went through the audience. Everyone began to chatter wildly at once, and in no time a deafening roar filled the room. 1 looked fearfully at Bluebeard, who was sitting on the floor about five feet from me. Without so much as batting an eyelash, he stared grimly ahead with his uninjured eye. Suddenly, I realized that the rogue had known, not just suspected, but actually known the whole time what was going on. He didn't exactly have the quickest mind under the sun, but he did possess one eminently important characteristic, namely a kind of native cunning, or what otherwise goes under the name of "survival instinct." This hidden talent enabled him to sense things by instinct that actually he should have known nothing about. And so, deep down, he had known all along that his horrible disfigurements had been the work of human beings, sadistic monsters who had treated his body as if it were a kind of living clay. Yet he had wasted no time bemoaning his fate; instead he had bared his teeth to the world and given back as good as he got day after day after day. Even if the human race had robbed him of various parts of his body, they could not take his valiant, stout heart from him.
Pascal tried to call the angry crowd to order: "Quiet, friends! Quiet, please!" But the hue and cry of the guests, who were venting their fright in this desperate way, had long since gotten out of control. Shock had overcome many of the maimed, and they stared blankly in front of themselves or were in tears. Friends licked one another in sympathy and spoke to one another in consolation. District chieftains roared out obscenities at me, as if I were responsible for the whole tragedy. Pascal made a few attempts to bring the crowd to reason until he saw the futility of his appeals and gave up, shaking his head.
When the scene began to take on tumultuous dimensions, Kong got up unhurriedly, arched his back and stretched in boredom, then turned around to the frenzied crowd and regarded it with the same indulgence a mother would have when regarding her wailing babies.
After a moment, he barked out the thunderous command: "That'll be enough!" His calm, reasonable expression abruptly turned into an icy mask of authority that tolerated no contradiction. Everyone quieted down and turned meekly again toward us at the front.
"Do you want to blubber or listen? My God, you're totally unglued! Why did you think some of us have been walking around like total wrecks? Because they happened to run into a pink flamingo in someone's backyard? Everyone knows that mice and humans are the worst animals. So calm yourselves down and let this wiseass go on yacking. Maybe he'll present us with the killer right now."
"Thank you, Kong," I sighed in relief, and bowed in his direction. Taking advantage of the silence that had suddenly returned, I continued. "Unfortunately, I can't present you with the killer right now, only, maybe, with the truth. A whole bunch of you, dear friends, revere the Prophet Claudandus. As I found out in the course of my inquiries, Claudandus in fact existed and was truly someone worthy of reverence. But there's absolutely nothing sacred about him, and God unfortunately didn't protect his life in any special way, because, just like the maimed among you, people also tortured him in this gruesome laboratory. When they found out that his physical constitution was biologically unique, he had to submit to the very worst torture. He died in the end, but in the legends and in the cult that Joker brought to the district, he lives on ..."
"He isn't dead!"
A squeaky female's voice. She had emerged from somewhere in the dark blanket before me that seemed knitted of many-colored, oversized balls of fur in which hundreds of pairs of eyes glittered like sparklers at a rock concert. From the corner of
