"Shit, you deserve the thanks! Didn't exactly bust my ass helping you out. Pascal was right. You really gotta keep a low profile during Christmas. Hibernate or something, or put that bonehead Kong in his place, otherwise I'll do it. Anyway, try to think of other things for a change. Have lots of fun and watch out that that old guy with the white fuzz on his face doesn't step on your tail tonight."
He turned his back on me and limped quickly to the door.
"Ah, Bluebeard?"
He stopped, a little too abruptly, and turned his shaggy head toward me. In his one healthy eye a knowing smile seemed to flicker.
"Do you think Joker is our man?"
"No." His answer came like a shot.
"Who do you think it is?"
"Whoever you're going to nail, wiseass."
He turned and vanished out the door.
The suspicion! The suspicion in my mind! It grew stronger and stronger until my skull felt like it was going to burst. A strange plan slowly took shape in my mind. It was stranger still that I would even carry out the plan, with the chances of success being almost zilch. But it had suddenly become my obsession. Superstition, compulsion, ritual—there were many labels for behavior as irrational as this. I didn't care; all at once I had shed the methods of the cool statistical analyst and was once again the short-sleeved detective.
"Ah, Bluebeard?"
The monstrous head craned around the doorjamb, which had been eaten away by moisture and insects. His eye, beaming in the darkness like a precious stone, revealed that he already knew what I was going to ask. He made no effort to stifle his smile.
"Where's that porcelain place where Joker lives?"
Once again our tacit understanding made any explanation superfluous. My friend thought the same way I did, and wanted to see the theorizing finally end. Just like at the beginning, action was called for, not one long-winded, know-it-all speech after another. Without asking why or reproaching me because he had already searched the house from top to bottom, he told me the address. And then he vanished without another word.
In the silence, I heard him slowly tramp down the stairs, go through the lower hall, and then hobble out the back door. Then I waited—one, two, three minutes—until my nerves were as taut as bowstrings, and I thought I would explode any minute.
Before I lost my mind beyond all hope of recovery, I ran down the steps in great bounds, left the house, and ran out into the driving snow. According to Bluebeard's description, the porcelain house was at the farthest corner of the district, so I had a long way to go over the backyard walls. But the obsession that now had me in its grip affected me like an amphetamine, and steeled me against all exertion, enabling me to cover great distances so fast they flew by. I had only a vague idea of what I wanted at the porcelain house. But somehow I knew events would take a surprising turn; I would find proof for my theory there. I remembered Bluebeard's words after he had looked around the building: "Searched the joint from top to bottom for the Reverend. Even got as far as this frigging stock room in the attic, which was pretty creepy, because the shelves there are bursting with porcelain statues showing us life-size."
The shelves … The shelves bursting full with porcelain figures representing our kind—life-size! Bluebeard had climbed through a basement window and, consequently, had not made his search from top to bottom, but from bottom to top. So he must have found access to the stock room through an open door. Then he had strolled through there and taken as close a look at that shoddy junk as he could stand and to the extent that the layout of the room permitted. That means he had looked at all those porcelain figures that resembled us so damn well from the frog's, or rather Felidae's, point-of-view—and then, too, with only one eye.
So that's what happened! He hadn't had the chance to look on top of the shelves.
I finally arrived at the house, which seemed like a corpse returned from the dead in the picturesque snowy landscape with its spotted, moldy walls and sinister aura. The porcelain store obviously was no gold mine, for the owner had let the old building go to ruin in such a negligent manner that if housing inspectors had paid him a visit he would have been presented with the stiffest fine in world history. The roof gutters were only half attached to their totally rusted supports, and hung down at oblique angles. A powerful gust of wind would have taken apart the whole junkyard, causing it to crash down on the head of an unsuspecting pedestrian. The walls were in no better condition. These seemed to be held together provisionally by trellises alone; ivy crept wildly around the building and showed big gaping cracks everywhere that aroused associations of yawning crevices. The windows looked like blind eyes, an impression that was evoked not only because they were completely filthy, but because some of them lacked windowpanes. A second-floor balcony had no railing; one had to guess that it was, in fact, a balcony. All in all, I had the feeling that a brutal deployment of our tried-and-true assault team, consisting of Action Archie (code name "Kidney Table Terminator") and Action Gustav (code name "Parquet Floor Ninja") was urgently needed.
As far as penetrating the house interior was concerned, I didn't have as much luck as Bluebeard. I circled the building once, but found that all the basement windows were shut this time. It was, however, easy to imagine that one of the skylights or even several would afford a good look at the storage room, and so what I next planned to do was solely animated by the thought of getting up on the roof as soon as possible. To do this, I had no other possibility but
