"You would be among the dead, Mr. Fox."
The fox nodded. "I would be. But would that matter?"
The commissaris' eyes twinkled briefly. He had remembered the plane landing on Jeremy's Island and recalled his fear. "It wouldn't matter to you, would it, Mr. Fox?"
The fox smiled back. "Oh, it would undoubtedly. I scare easy, but we are discussing a theory. The point is that my death, which would be part of the extinction of our species, may not be all that important."
The commissaris drank his brandy. De Gier moved uneasily. There was no breakthrough yet. He wished the commissaris would reach out more openly and wondered whether he could help.
The fox had moved too, but the commissaris sat very quietly, his whole attitude suggesting that he was very much at ease and had nothing in mind. Except sipping a little more brandy perhaps.
The fox tugged at his hair. "You came to ask questions? I hear you visited Jeremy earlier on today."
The commissaris looked over the rim of his mug. "News travels quickly in Woodcock County, Mr. Fox."
The fox shrugged. "I have a CB radio in my jeep. I heard Madelin talk to the old guy who runs the airstrip. You asked Jeremy questions?"
"Yes."
"Did he answer?"
"In a way."
The fox jumped up, clapped his hands, laughed, and sat down again. "In a way!"
De Gier laughed too. It was done now. He got up, stretched, and wandered over to Albert, who reached for the brandy bottle. Albert grinned back at him and poured. The fox was still talking.
"Jeremy is my local sage. I used to go over to the island and I would ask him questions, but he never answered. He would talk about other things instead, different things altogether. Tell me stories, jokes, anything. But he never seemed to hear what I asked. Then later, maybe the next day, I would think about what he had said and find. that he had answered. Very funny, and annoying too. He plays around, and very seriously, once you get a feeling as to what he is doing. But go ahead, you can ask me questions now. I may want to try to imitate Jeremy's method, but I won't be as good at it as he is."
"You try, and I'll try," the commissaris said goodhumoredly.
The fox was on his feet again. "One moment, before you go ahead I want to ask a question too. How does your quest go? Can you point at anyone yet?"
The commissaris shook his head. "I am a foreign visitor to your great country, Mr. Fox. I wouldn't point a finger at anyone, but your sheriff will I think, and I would imagine that we don't have to wait long now."
"You hear that, Albert?" the fox asked. "My sheriff. Your sheriff too. Our public servant, if only he would remember."
"Oh, he does, Mr. Fox. I have had the pleasure of being able to observe the sheriff, and so has the sergeant here. We are quite impressed. And so should you be. To consider authority as the enemy isn't always wise, and perhaps even… yes… childish. But no matter. It is my turn now, and here is my question. How did you manage to send off Captain Schwartz? I believe you admitted being instrumental in his departure, but I didn't hear how you forced him to remove himself, and I am interested."
The fox ran his fingers over a freshly cut board. "Okay, if you want to know I'll tell you, but you'll only get my side of the experiment. You should ask the captain too. But then his side might be confused. They say he's crazy, which, unfortunately, may be true. If it is true my experiment is all balled up. I was hoping that he'd turn out to be intelligent."
"He wasn't?"
"Perhaps not. But he was a Nazi, and still is I'm sure. I did some reading at college about what the Nazis call their philosophy. There was a lot of hogwash in their literature, but they also talked about the right of the strong, which interested me, of course. Like what I saw in the woods- the clever and the strong eat the stupid and the weak. The superrace. And when you have a superrace you have an underrace. You can either destroy or use the underrace. But the Nazi books were too crude somehow. They said something, but they didn't say it right. And I knew I couldn't just learn from books, I would have to find some direct learning, mouth-to-mouth stuff, and do some experimenting. And here was a real-life Nazi, an officer. I had another angle too. My father was shot by the Nazis. According to what I've been told, he was caught by an SS patrol and the Germans didn't feel like being bothered by prisoners that day. Maybe they were short of manpower or maybe they didn't have time, I don't know. Anyway, they lined up their catch and machine-gunned them from the rear."
The fox was on his feet, talking almost eagerly.
"Yes?"
"So here we have Captain Schwartz. It was only afterward that I found out that he'd never been a fighting man. He was only a clerk captain, doing paperwork behind the lines in Korea. Rather a mousy man, but all I had. And he does walk around in a U.S. uniform with the proper insignia taken off and replaced by a red armband with a black swastika. He has a portrait of Hitler in his hall, and he plays records of German war songs. I went to see him and took a hand gun, a Magnum, a heavy gun. He wouldn't let me in, but I kicked the door out of his hands and let myself in. He went for the telephone, but I beat him to it and threw the telephone through his window. The window was closed. There was a bit of a mess. I wanted to show him that I was the stronger party, you see."
"Obviously."
The fox grinned. "Quite."
"Did you manhandle the captain?"
"No, that wasn't necessary. I sat down and made him sit down opposite me, and I asked him about his philosophy and about what he was trying to do. He didn't answer. Then I put my gun on the table. I told him I would leave the room and that he could shoot me in the back. I even cocked the gun for him as it has a heavy trigger. I also told him that if he didn't shoot me, I would come back into the room again to collect my gun. I didn't say I would kill him or harm him in any way."
"You're still with us, Mr. Fox."
"Sure. He did nothing. The experiment fell flat. He wouldn't even answer the simplest questions."
"You had some revenge, Mr. Fox. Did you tell him about what happened to your father?"
"No. I didn't have revenge in mind. But you're right in a way. It was good to see mm fidget and listen to his teeth chatter. He left Cape Orca the next day. His son or somebody came and sold the house."
"Thank you," the commissaris said. "Very good of you to confide in me."
"Confide?" the fox asked. "I did more than that. You are working for the sheriff and I've just made a confession. According to local rules my behavior was criminal. You can have me arrested."
The commissaris put his mug down and nodded when Albert held up the bottle. "Just a drop, please. No, Mr. Fox. There's no call for your suggestion. If you hadn't known that I wouldn't pass on your information you wouldn't have given it to me. But I'd like to know a little more. Madelin told the sergeant and the sergeant told me that you took your disciples, or fellow students, to a slum in New York once and fought a local gang. One of your mates got a knife in his chest and died. You yourself knifed and killed a member of the opposing gang. Is that correct?"
"That's correct."
"Why did you go that far?"
The fox took a moment and grinned slyly. "Go all the way to New York, you mean? But what else could I do? We're out in the sticks here, on the edge of the country. Canada starts across the hills and it's all sticks up there too, for hundreds of miles. We're backward country people. Some of us read books and so did I, but books are theory. I learned how to saw lumber from books, but I couldn't cut a board properly until an old sawyer came along and taught me. In New York we could be shown what our thoughts look like in action."