The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban

looking at you,’ I returned. ‘Are you just a courier or do you do other work for M. Delarue?’
    ‘I am his chauffeur.’
    ‘What sort of a man is M. Delarue?’
    ‘Rich,’ he answered, then made a gesture of zipping his lips, after which he raised an admonitory index finger.
    ‘Right, no more questions about him. What did you do before you became his chauffeur?’
    ‘Time.’
    ‘Ah.’ I was going to ask him what he did the time for but thought better of it, so we drank companionably but without conversation from then on until he left, and thus ended the first transaction with my new patron.
    The next morning a fax arrived in which M. Delarue said that he was delighted, his satisfaction was greater than expected; the action of the figures together with the sound produced an experience without parallel. He was lost in admiration and looked forward with eager anticipation to the mastiff.
    It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the strange becomes the usual. Whoever and whatever M. Delarue was, he was willing and able to pay handsomely for his playthings and I now settled into the role of providing him with the wooden objects of his desire. As I began my mastiff research I wondered what the end of all this would be. In the meantime, craftsmanship and the moral obligation to do the job right took over. As well as something else which I’ve already touched on: these wooden erotica excited me; not only erotically but — dare I use the word? — artistically. Working with wood felt good; it put new heart into me. I was beginning to feel like an artist, beginning to wonder what I might carve when I finished with M. Delarue’s commissions.
    I looked at mastiffs in books, I talked to mastiff breeders on the telephone, I went to Watford to photograph a dog called Longmoor’s Dark Dandy and paid his owner fifty pounds. Remarking my interest in the animal’s private parts, he smiled knowingly and asked for twenty-five pounds more, which I paid with a cryptic smile. Although he obviously had theories, I very much doubted that he could imagine what my research was for.
    On my return I bought more wood, made my clay model, just a little hyperbolised, went to the lime, thoroughly enjoyed the carving, and ended up with a crash-dummy mastiff that could confidently collide with the best society.
    As before, Dieter Scharf supplied the pelvic motor. ‘It didn’t take us long to get down on all fours, did it,’ he said.
    Although no sound had been requested I looped a tape of Maria Callas singing ‘E
strano! E strano!
’ and the aria that follows in Act One of
La Traviata, ‘Ah, forse e lui che l’anima
…’, ‘Ah, perhaps he is the one …’ The finishing touch on my crash-dummy creatures was always the yellow-and-black-quartered discs; these came to have an almost mystical quality for me, particularly when they were in motion.
    Jean-Louis and I did the business as before, and Bonzo was received as enthusiastically as the first figures had been. ‘The animal is all that one could wish,’ wrote M. Delarue, ‘and the music — what a touch!’ The cheque Jean-Louis had given me brought the total up to fifty-five thousand pounds, fifteen thousand of which was a down payment on the next commission. ‘It is my hope,’ he wrote, ‘that your earnings from these commissions will gain for you a little non-commercial time in which to follow your art wherever it leads.’
    My art! Although I was beginning to feel like an artist I hadn’t been thinking of what I did as art but perhaps a rethink was in order. This was a time when unmade beds and used condoms were fetching high prices, and certainly my crash-dummies were no less — maybe even more — art than those.
    M. Delarue’s next request was for a crash-dummy gorilla with the usual specs. Feeling that he might have underpaid me on the first two commissions, he was offering thirty thousand pounds, confident that my work, as always, would exceed expectations. That would