The tomb painting was obviously meant to portray a young king or deity hunting. Draped with a white sash around the hips and festooned with splendid neck jewelry, the young man held a snake in one hand and three game birds in the other. He stood in a papyrus boat at a lake shore, which was rank with reeds and swamp plants. Birds and ducks of the most varied species surrounded him in a dizzying splendor of color. In the background enigmatic hieroglyphs loomed, and to the far right you could see a small goddess in a golden robe, who seemed to be giving the scene her blessing. The painting, which in accordance with Egyptian tradition portrayed every detail from a lateral perspective, was presumably a hunting document and therefore compressed to the essentials. What, however, gave me the shock of my life was the brother at the hunter's feet. Accompanying the young man, he, on his part, had game birds gripped firmly in his muzzle and between his paws. I knew that the ancient Egyptians had first employed us as hunting hounds and only afterwards put us into combat against noxious rodents in grain-growing areas. Those honorable brothers and sisters, however, were anything but the totally domesticated creatures we are. They were direct descendants of the original Felidae. And without a doubt the specimen in the tomb painting was one of those descendants. But what was uncanny about the entire scene was the fact that this age-old ancestor looked exactly like the sister with whom I had mated last week. The same sand-colored coat that blended into bright beige on the underbelly; the same thickset body; the same eyes that glowed like jewels …
Then the miracle happened: I had a revelation! It was just as if a gigantic wall in my head had collapsed and the dazzling light of a thousand suns flooded in. All at once I knew:
We were being rebred - unnoticeably. Back to our origins, back to the earlier forms of modern Felidae, perhaps even further back to the proud original Felidae who had not known the chains of domestication, who, free and without ties, had roamed through the world as fearsome predators, reaping respect for themselves wherever they happened to be.
I had to get to the bottom of this affair. I turned around with a start, seeking feverishly in the bookshelves for Gustav's extensive collection of reference works. Finally I discovered the volume with the letter "G" in the uppermost shelf. I made a running start on the desk, shot up high, got the book between my front paws, tore it down from the shelf, and plummeted with it to the floor.
Gustav commented on the noise with indistinct mumbling sounds, but his peaceful snoring soon started up again. I leafed through the book with the speed of a bank-bill-registering machine until finally I found the heading I sought: Genetics.
Already while reading the first sentence my body began to shake in feverish excitement. On the one hand, I was terribly angry at my own stupidity for criminally neglecting this important point, and on the other, I was seized with icy terror, because I believed I now at long last knew the murderer and his motive.
With a faint heart, I looked at the encyclopedia article again.
The laws of genetics were first discovered by the Jesuit priest Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884). In the course of crossbreeding plant varieties, the autodidactic scientist was confronted by a problem that seized his attention and that he saw more keenly and approached more methodically than anyone before him: how are genetic characteristics transmitted? Earlier hybridization attempts lacked experimental precision, systematic observation over periods of generations, and logical analysis. The diversity of hybrid generations and "reversions" in later generations that made a hybrid more or less similar to the paternal and maternal lines of descent were cause for continual astonishment. From 1856 on, Mendel conducted methodical experiments on garden peas, and then published his forty-seven-page treatise "Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden." …
Gregor Johann Mendel, the priest of the wall painting, the giant from my nightmare. Now that I was gradually putting the whole story together, all the details of the case shot through my mind like memorable scenes from a film. Yet they were only revealing now in retrospect, for I had not been in a position to understand the messages encoded in them.
The more film clips flickered before my mind's eye, the more clearly they formed a flaming red arrow of logic whose glowing tip pointed directly at the murderer …
Right at the beginning, with Sascha, the first victim I discovered, it caught my eye that he had been aroused at the time of his murder. When I made the same observation in the case of Deep Purple's corpse, I surmised that someone had wanted to prevent the murdered from mating. Why didn't I ask myself which female they had wanted to lay? Why on earth hadn't I from the start so conducted my investigations that I could find out which females in the district had been in heat at the time of the murder?
I should have listened to my dreams right at the outset. My unerring instinct had deposited magic keys in them, keys with which the steel doors of the mystery could have been opened.
The first nightmare in the new neighborhood, the first key … The faceless man in the long white apron in that white nothingness, which clearly was meant to symbolize that laboratory of torture, was Julius Preterius. He had no face, because the professor literally no longer possessed a face—he had
