"Who said that?" I asked.
"Me. I said that," chirped the voice. There was a commotion in the middle of the crowd. The members of the meeting standing there slowly fell back, forming a circle around a very young sister. They stared at her as if one were a sensation.
She was a jewel, a bewitching bauble of the Harlequin race. The gleaming whiteness of her silky coat was necked only on her nose, her left ear, chest, and tail with the typically small, triangular, black spots that in fact did make her look like a harlequin. When she noticed that she was being gaped at from all sides, she seemed to regret her courageous interjection, for her ears twitched nervously. She strolled up to the front and stopped before me with a shy smile.
"Who are you, dear?" I smiled in return, trying not to make her more nervous than she already was.
"They call me Pepeline," she answered with surprising confidence. I recognized that soon she would develop into a particularly seductive nymphet. The thought filled me for a moment with giddy delight, but at the same time made clear to me how far behind me were the untroubled days of my childhood.
"What do you know about Claudandus, Pepeline? And why do you believe that he isn't already dead?"
"Well, because my Great-Grandfather told me," she replied, looking around at the audience with childlike pride.
"Who is your Great-Grandfather?"
"Father Joker. He rarely visits my mother and me, and when he does come to our house, once or twice a year, he reproaches us for having skipped a meeting or two. But once I was home all alone and bored to death. Suddenly, Great-Grandfather came by, and the strange thing was, he felt sorry for me and let me persuade him to play. We played and hunted all day long. And because he had been so sweet to me, I wanted to cheer him up on my part, and so, just as he was going to go, I asked him to tell me the legend of Claudandus. Naturally, I already knew all those stories by heart, but if you really want to make Great-Grandfather happy, then all you have to do is ask him to give a sermon. He can never praise the Prophet enough. So he told the sacred legend once again, except that this time there was a slight variation. At first he said nothing unusual, just how cruel things were in the Land of Pain and what tortures Claudandus and his fellow sufferers had to undergo from their tormentors. But the day's exertions had made Great-Grandfather pretty sleepy, and he wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. He said that at the end Claudandus had challenged the insane monster to a fight, and killed it during the ensuing struggle. That's when I contradicted him: 'But Father Joker, you usually say that the Lord destroyed the monster and that Claudandus ascended into heaven.' Then Great-Grandfather noticed all of a sudden that he had forgotten himself, and corrected himself: 'Yes, yes, my dear, after that, of course, he did ascend into heaven.' Then he made me promise not to tell anyone this version of the legend because that would be a sin. I was really little then and didn't think twice about it. But now I know that Great-Grandfather had revealed more on that day than he wanted to."
Like everyone in the room, I, too, was overwhelmed by the spectacular twist in the story. Unlike the others, however, I understood the full implications of this twist. It didn't really matter to the others whether in the end the Prophet had taken a taxi to heaven or had become chairman of British Petroleum. The ways of saints just happen to be mysterious. What difference did it make whether Claudandus was alive or not? This seemingly unimportant detail, however, cast an entirely new light on the murders. For Pepeline's statement was in full agreement with Jesaja's. The uncanny voice that the Guardian of the Dead had heard in the shafts was the Prophet's, if what Pepeline said was true. So Claudandus really had survived Preterius's grueling torture, and even murdered his own torturer.
And then? What had become of him then? Where was he living? What did he do when he wasn't giving someone's neck a going-over? Even if Claudandus, who had Joker's publicity campaign to thank for his swift rise as Prophet, was the murderer, what on earth was the crackpot motive for killing his own kind? Had his bitter ordeal made him go crazy? After he had liquidated his tyrant—a pretty farfetched notion—had he wanted to go on killing? No, that assumption was probably false. For then he wouldn't have cared anymore at all about whom he did in. But the killer clearly had special interests …
The whispering and murmuring in the crowd rose anew. I had to say a few soothing words now so that things wouldn't get to the point they had before. I had to give my listeners the feeling that this crazy affair wasn't crazy at all, but completely "normal," that is, transparent, explicable—yes, perhaps I would even have to lie.
"Dear friends, I realize that you are somewhat confused after hearing sister Pepeline's story. But really everything is very simple. Father Joker was secretly observing those abominable laboratory experiments at that time. He knew Claudandus, and he knew that he could turn the aura of sanctity enveloping this ambiguous martyr to his own advantage. He founded the Claudandist religion, to which almost all of you belong. It turned out, though, that the whole business wasn't so holy after all. We've just heard that Claudandus even survived. That's new news to me, too. Well, no matter what
