Yok (5 page)

“My head has never been my strong suit,” Ortega
admitted without letting Beatrice out of his sight for a moment.

“No, no. No, you seem to be an honest,
straightforward type. Of course you'll have her.” Dragon Aguado Molina
laughed.

Beatrice started and turned toward her father.

What was he saying? This couldn't be happening.

And the jubilant feeling of happiness that filled
her in the next moment was stronger than anything she had experienced until now.
During the weeks that followed she would return, again and again, to this
feeling, confused and enchanted.

The fox, too, looked in surprise at Dragon Aguado
Molina.

“You're a good stuffed animal,” he said happily and
contentedly. “I knew you would understand.”

“Yes, yes, you will absolutely get to marry my
daughter . . .” Molina continued cunningly. “But first you have to
prove that you're the right animal for her. We don't know each other, do
we?”

Fox nodded seriously. That sounded reasonable.

Vasko Manatee sensed what was coming and hid his
smile behind his forelimb.

“You must give me three things,” said Molina. “A
feather. An arm. And a heart.”

“A feather, an arm, and a heart?”

“We'll start with the feather,” said Molina,
getting up. “It won't be that hard. There's a prosecutor here in Sors. Hawk
Schleizinger. It would be fun to joke around with him a little. He has lots of
feathers. He'll give you one, won't he, Fox? Come back with the hawk's feather,
then I'll tell you about the arm. You have ten days. If you don't have the
feather by then, you can forget my beautiful Beatrice!”

 

The Feather

F
ox Antonio
Ortega went to work without delay and without giving a thought to how strange
the whole thing was. Why should he get to marry Dragon Aguado Molina's daughter
by stealing a feather from Hawk Schleizinger's plumage? That didn't make sense.
But Fox was so absorbed by his love for Beatrice Cockatoo that he did not care
about logic or sense.

It was not hard to find out where Hawk Schleizinger
lived. True, he wasn't in the phone book, but in Yok the phone book means
nothing and contacts mean everything. Schleizinger was a known animal, and in
the evening two days later Fox Antonio Ortega was standing on the sidewalk
across from the hawk's house, peering in through one of the windows on the
bottom floor. A warm light from the desk lamp illuminated a small library.

Hawk Schleizinger was sitting at his desk and
looked up from his work. He rested his gaze on the long rows of leather-bound
spines on the bookshelves. His nightclothes, blue-striped pajamas and a silk
bathrobe, smelled of pipe tobacco and leather armchair. The silence was
absolute.

The computer was not turned on. In the evening
Schleizinger avoided modern technology. That was how he separated his work at
home from the office. He could access all archives and files from home if he
wanted, but in solitude at the polished desk, where piles of paper were arranged
with a system as irreproachable as his arguments in court, buzzing electronics
did not seem to fit in. With paper and pen in his claws, he forced the flood of
associations into controlled reflection.

Above the liquor cabinet in the corner toward the
terrace, four TV screens showed images from the surveillance cameras in the
garden and out toward the street. At night they looked like blurry
black-and-white photographs. Schleizinger lived in a stone building on fire red
Mount Row in Amberville, and describing the neighborhood as tranquil was an
understatement; nothing happened at night.

For that reason the hawk raised his eyes from time
to time, and looked over at the screen image, where a fox on the other side of
the street was moving in and out of camera range.

Schleizinger was an imposing bird, both by
profession and by appearance. He always dressed in vest and suit, bow tie rather
than necktie, and shoes polished so that the leather resembled varnish. Despite
his curious gaze, Hawk Schleizinger always had a stern, cerebral air about him;
heavy eyebrows; and a sharply curving beak. It was hard to imagine him in any
other profession. He worked as chief public prosecutor at the court in the Sors
District in Yok, and in the legal system in Mollisan Town there was probably no
position more exposed. He had a reputation for being incorruptible; he had
worked as a prosecutor in the district for more than twenty years, and had long
ago given up on a political career. In other words, he was untouchable in a way
that time and again made dragons, octopuses, and other animals of darkness plan
attacks against him. Until now they had failed.

No stuffed animal in Mollisan Town was as well
guarded as Hawk Schleizinger.

Schleizinger interrupted his writing and raised his
eyes toward the surveillance monitors. Once again the fox passed the camera
facing the street.

Irritated, the prosecutor threw aside the pen and
paper, got up, and went over to the screens. He sat down in front of the control
board, turned on the recording function, and rewound.

There.

There was no doubt. Fox was staring right through
the windows into the library where Hawk sat working.

With his claw against the screen of the monitor
Schleizinger drew a square around the fox's head, and in a few seconds
enlargements were created. Schleizinger pushed “send,” waited longer than was
customary—perhaps the database was heavily used tonight—and then the information
came up:

Fox Antonio Ortega. No criminal record, but school
records, medical records, and a clippings file of sports achievements. A young
animal with miserable grades in school, not registered as a gang member, but
from experience Hawk knew that this was uncertain information because the gangs
recruited aggressively among the young. What was odd in this context was that
Ortega had an impressive record as far as accomplishments in youth sports was
concerned.

Schleizinger continued reading, and it was only
when he arrived at the family relationships that it started to make sense. The
mother was Cat Bayas Delgado, the father a certain José Bear. In other words:
the same bear who for the past four days had been sitting in jail in Sors
waiting for trial.

Schleizinger could not keep from smiling at the
fact that only an hour ago he had been sitting with the bear's papers before him
on the desk.

He picked up the phone, the one in the middle of
the control board, and without dialing he was connected to Smithson Yak.

“Is this about the fox out there?” Smithson asked
before Hawk could even state his business.

“He has a motive,” said the prosecutor.

“Then we'll bring him in,” Smithson answered.

The hawk sat down again at the control panel. On
the monitor he saw how Smithson's stuffed animals ran out onto the street. They
were all armed, but none had yet drawn a weapon. They were hesitating, but then
Hawk saw one of them point at something outside the range of the camera, and
they all started running that way.

Poor fox, thought Hawk, smiling to himself.

The chief prosecutor decided to interrogate the
young Antonio Ortega first thing the next day. It never hurt to let them sit
overnight.

B
ut in
the car en route to court the following morning a surprise awaited. Hawk
Schleizinger's personal security force had come up empty-handed the previous
night. Smithson, who was behind the wheel and had an anonymous colleague in a
dark suit and sunglasses beside him, was forced to admit the failure.

“I've never seen anyone run so fast,” he said. “I
mean it, never. Not in- or outside a stadium.”

“I beg your pardon?” Hawk asked. “That sounds
improbable. There were four of you and he was alone?”

“There could have been fifty-four of us,” Smithson
answered, while he gently and sensitively maneuvered the lead-reinforced car
through the dense morning traffic. “If you can't catch them, numbers don't help.
His father is José Bear?”

Smithson had access to the same database as the
prosecutor.

“Small-timer,” Schleizinger stated. “I'm not going
to ask for more than three to six months. He seems to be the type who never
climbs up to the next division. He was arrested for lottery fraud. Not much to
make a fuss about.”

“You've never run into Antonio Ortega before? There
are no other connections?” Smithson asked.

“That remains to be found out,” Schleizinger
replied.

They turned off the busy avenue and continued south
on deep blue Avinguda de Pedrables. Even though it was one of Yok's biggest
throughways, it was noticeable how the pace of traffic decreased. In Mollisan
Town's poorest district, car activity was sparse. Through its complicated
structure, the many dead ends, the recurring pirate attacks, plus the fact that
few stuffed animals in Yok could afford a car, bicycles, skateboards, and roller
skates were more common sights on the streets.

The court in Sors was a gray, square concrete block
of a building with long rows of square windows. It was on vanilla white Amiral
Zee's street, and outside the entrance the police had created a so-called
security zone to deter organized crime from rescue attempts. Personnel who
worked at the court used the garage to enter the building, and this also applied
to the prosecutor. The entry ramp was located a few blocks south, and
underground you drove back north, parked, and took the armored elevator up to
your floor.

With three cross streets left to the garage,
Smithson Yak stopped at a light.

They saw him at the same time.

“Antonio Ortega!” Smithson Yak panted, pointing so
his colleague could see.

“The audacity!” Hawk Schleizinger exclaimed.

On the sidewalk across from the court building,
outside a small Springergaast, stood Fox Antonio Ortega. He was peering at the
court's main entrance.

Even before the light turned green Smithson had
given his orders. Via the internal radio he contacted the guards at the entrance
to the court, and as the car with the prosecutor slowly passed Fox—who was on
the left side—Yak could see police officers storming out of the building on the
right.

“I want him in the interrogation room as soon as
possible. Just call me; I'll come down,” said Hawk.

“Understood, sir,” Smithson replied.

He turned right onto the ramp to the garage and saw
in the rearview mirror how Fox Antonio Ortega began running, with the police
after him.

W
hen
no word had come by lunchtime, Hawk summoned Smithson. The shame-faced yak,
after failing for the second time to capture the fox, had even sent animals to
Ortega's latest known address, without success. Now he explained that he had not
wanted to submit a report because he didn't consider the case over with.

“I'll continue to work on the fox this afternoon,”
the yak promised.

That his own guards had not managed to capture the
fox last night was one thing, but that the police failed—with their cars,
motorcycles, and communications equipment—was worrisome. Hawk Schleizinger was
sincerely surprised.

During the afternoon the prosecutor managed to
cross-examine a licorice troll indicted for having extorted money from his
sister by threatening to expose her extramarital connections, plus make a final
plea in the case of a drug-abusing locksmith, an argument that Hawk was
personally satisfied with. It ended with the locksmith being sentenced to four
years in King's Cross, a sentence that Schleizinger would not appeal. After a
short visit to chambers to change shirt, vest, and bow tie, the prosecutor
hurried off to the elevators just in time for the Evening Weather and rode down
to the garage, where the car was waiting with the motor running. Behind the
wheel sat one of the many security animals with a dark suit and strong jawline,
whom Hawk could not tell apart.

He leaned back and closed his eyes while the car
slowly rolled away toward the ramp. He did not need to say where he was going;
his schedule had been confirmed and communicated for weeks. Twenty minutes'
sleep in the backseat was just what he needed.

Once a month prosecutor Schleizinger had dinner
with Manuela Hamster, the police chief in Sors. She was a professional
administrator, an ambitious politician, but Schleizinger respected her anyway.
She held her district in an iron grip, and her fight against corruption in the
police force was genuine and reasonably successful. When the two did not meet at
her office, they had dinner at Au Sultan. It was Schleizinger's favorite
restaurant, mostly due to the pickled radishes that were served as an appetizer.
Both the prosecutor's and the police chief's bodyguards felt comfortable with
the place; it was simple to secure and guard.

Manuela Hamster was at the table when Hawk
Schleizinger entered the restaurant. They had jointly decided that the table in
the corner next to the bar was the best. They sat with their backs to the wall,
with a view of the entrance and restrooms opposite. The bodyguards sat at the
window tables, and from the other direction they were protected by the
lead-reinforced bar.

“Congratulations,” said Manuela, rising briefly as
Hawk sat down. “I heard you had yet another brilliant performance today. Four
years, was that it?”

“It wasn't me,” Schleizinger answered modestly. “It
was justice that triumphed. That happens sometimes. Extremely satisfying.”

He was not a humorous stuffed animal. He picked up
the menu from the table, but set it down again.

“I already know what I want,” he said. “Have you
decided?”