Judy took the same route that she always did once the train arrived at her stop, but she paused at one of the newsstands near the exit of the station. The headline of the Times screamed for attention; there, in massive letters across the many copies on display it read: "Six Dead in Tundra Town Speakeasy Shooting."
She bought a copy of the paper and leaned against the wall of the station, flipping through the article briefly, safely out of the path of the many mammals hustling about their business. There wasn't much to accompany the lurid headline; at least at the time that the paper had been printed, the police had refused to comment, leaving the reporter to spin a weak story out of details that all seemed to have come second-hand or from unnamed anonymous sources. The only detail of any worth, to her mind, was that one of the six mammals killed had been Antonin Koslov. She recognized the name from an affidavit she had read from a former gangster attempting a plea deal; it had claimed that Koslov had been one of Mr. Big's most trusted lieutenants. Judy frowned as she folded the paper back up, tucking it under her arm and resuming her walk to the Bureau office. As she recalled, no charges had been brought against Koslov following the series of arrests and convictions that brought down Mr. Big's criminal empire, but the polar bear had remained under Bureau surveillance. Judy hadn't read any of those reports, but she thought it suspicious that, in the two years that had passed, no action had been taken. It didn't seem likely that he would simply happen to be in a nearly empty speakeasy that happened to be attacked by what could only have been a gang, and she made a mental note to dig further into the records once she was in the office.
It was a short walk from the train station to the Bureau office, and Judy was too consumed by her thoughts to notice any of the sights that had amazed her when she had first arrived in the city. After a month, dodging the streetcars and automobiles that choked the wide streets was simply second nature, and she didn't pause to look into any of the storefront windows where a dazzling variety of goods were sold. Her destination, unfortunately, was not one of the many amazingly tall buildings with their simple yet elegant designs, the windows orange in the light of the rising sun.
The James Buckanan Federal Building was squat and ugly, three stories of drab brick with crumbling marble decorations that had yellowed in the air of the city. On that morning, however, not even the gloomy building, with its oppressively narrow windows and generally dingy atmosphere, could bring Judy down. The open office space, with the desks all neatly arranged in a massive grid, was completely empty; she had arrived a couple hours before the daily morning meeting, before anyone else was at their desks. Judy spent the time at her desk sorting files and looking for anything she could link back to Koslov. Although she was typically only asked to cross-reference a few given files against each other, she refused to allow herself the limitation that would have vastly simplified her work and instead considered all of the files that she had read. By the official reckoning, there were four major bootlegging operations left in Zootopia after Mr. Big's racket had been crushed and countless smaller operations. The allegiances and rivalries between the small time players and the larger operations were ever-shifting and about impossible to understand where they stood at any given moment; the best that could be done was to see where they had been. Koslov appeared to exist in something of a blind spot in the documentation, which was again concerning. What was clear to her, however, even after only a month on the job, was that the situation was escalating. The shooting at Tundra Town Lanes was the second shooting that week following one in Sahara Square, and there had been nearly a dozen more over the previous month that it seemed could only be related to gangsters.
Judy realized that she had been absentmindedly chewing on her pencil as she read and pulled it out of her mouth. It was a bad habit that had ruined countless pencils, and her instinctive desire to gnaw to prevent her teeth from growing too long was no excuse. Besides, she had the feeling that her coworkers saw it as unprofessional. She had never gotten the feeling that she was being deliberately excluded—they were, for the most part, friendly enough—but there was still a sense of distance between her and them, as though they didn't fully trust her. The other Bureau agents were mostly sheep, which might have explained part of her feeling outside their clique, but she felt that being completely untested out in the real world was the larger part of it. That would hopefully change soon, though, and Judy's thoughts turned to what Bellwether might assign her before she pushed them down and returned to her review of reports.
About twenty minutes after Judy had sat down at her desk the sheep who had the desk next to her arrived, and Judy greeted him brightly. He simply grunted a response and went immediately to flipping through his inbox; Judy hadn't expected much more from him, as she didn't think that Douglas Ramses had ever spoken to her without a reason. From some of her more talkative coworkers, she knew that the taciturn sheep was a veteran of the Great War, which she supposed probably explained his missing left arm. It wasn't the sort of thing that she would have asked him about even if he had been friendlier. Although Judy didn't know anyone from Bunnyburrows who had served on the front lines since bunnies had been excluded from the draft, it didn't take much tact to imagine that it might be a sensitive topic.
Although Douglas had been the first agent to arrive after Judy, he certainly wasn't the last, and the office gradually filled with agents until it was time for the morning meeting. Promptly at nine o'clock, Bellwether emerged from her office; Judy wasn't sure exactly how early the ewe arrived every day, but she had never been early enough to beat her. As she always was, Dawn Bellwether was conservatively dressed, this time in an austere gray dress, the wool atop her head pulled back into a tight bun. The little ewe held in her hooves a packet of files, and Judy leaned forward eagerly. There were times when Bellwether reminded her of a schoolteacher; there was just something about the bright tone she typically took that called to mind a teacher explaining something to a class. Indeed, the way that Bellwether asked for status updates from the agents in the middle of assignments reminded her of nothing less than a teacher asking a student to report on their homework. Judy had to force her leg to stop bouncing with impatience as she waited for Bellwether to begin distributing new assignments. She gave them out to the more experienced agents first, assignments that ran from tailing suspects to coordinating with the police to raid a warehouse operated by bootleggers. At long last, though, Bellwether had only a single file in her hooves, and she turned her attention to Judy. "Agent Hopps," she said, "For your first field assignment, there's a club in Tundra Town I want you to investigate."
Judy's heart leaped into her throat. Surely Bellwether could only mean the speakeasy that the shooting of six mammals had occurred at the previous day; she could not have hoped for a better first assignment to demonstrate what she was capable of. When she opened the folder, though, Judy had a moment of puzzlement before her heart sank. The assignment named a jazz club called the Thief of the Night as the target, while the speakeasy the shooting had occurred at had not been named other than being under a bowling alley called Tundra Lanes. The outline of the assignment was blandly stated and perfectly clear; she was simply to determine if the Thief of the Night served alcohol in violation of the law without calling any attention to herself and report back with her findings. Bellwether was already making her way back to her office, but Judy could not stop herself from calling after her. "Ma'am, what about the shooting at the speakeasy in Tundra Town yesterday? You didn't assign anyone to that."
Everyone, even the mammals on their way out of the office area, stopped and turned to look at Judy, including Bellwether herself. "We'll get involved when we get called in," Bellwether said, sounding unperturbed, "Agent Hopps, why don't you come into my office for a quick minute?"
"You know, Judy, we have a lot in common," Bellwether said once she had taken a seat and the office door was closed, "We both came from farms... Both were the first mammals in our families to go to college... Both the first to move to the big city."
Bellwether raised her arms and swept them around like a queen taking in her lands, "This could all be yours, in a decade or so."
The sheep wore a wry smile as she said it, but Judy couldn't blame her. Bellwether's office was easily the nicest in the building, but that wasn't saying much. It was a tiny room with sagging wooden floors and thick water pipes running from floor to ceiling in one corner. The large but plain desk, unadorned except for a framed photograph of Bellwether and her family but otherwise covered with paperwork, took up so much of the limited floor space that the rickety chair Judy sat in was just barely out of the path of the door's arc. The room's lone window had been bricked up when an addition to the building had been made, tumor-like, and the only light came from a dim green-shaded lamp. The cheerless walls of rough red brick were only marginally livened up by a cross-stitch of Ephesians 5:18 with a floral border that hung where the window had once been. "I don't want to see you making the same mistakes I did," Bellwether continued, her tone sympathetic.
Judy was not quite sure how to respond, but Bellwether took the burden off of her by abruptly asking what seemed like a total non sequitur. "Did your family raise chickens?"
"No, we didn't," Judy responded, puzzled as to what possible relevance the question could have.
"Mine did," Bellwether said, "For the eggs, of course. Grew wheat, too."
Bellwether got an almost faraway look in her eyes and wasn't looking directly at Judy as she continued. "We used to have a farmhand. About the biggest wolf you ever saw, back about the size of a kitchen table. Jim, he was called. Not too much going on upstairs, bless his heart, but that's a pred for you. He did alright at planting and harvesting; that pup could work all day. No complaints there."
As Bellwether spoke, it seemed to Judy that a bit of the country drawl that the sheep must have once had crept back into her voice. "One day, though, my sister took ill. She was the one who usually minded the chickens, you see. She couldn't even get out of bed, the poor dear, so Jim said he'd take care of them. He'd never done it before, but there's not much to it, is there? Even a wolf ought to be able to get it right."
Bellwether chuckled and shook her head. "Wasn't even half an hour later we all heard the commotion from the coops. When I got there, Jim was holding a chicken in one paw and all the other chickens were squawking and flapping like it was Judgement Day."
She paused, and shifted her gaze to face Judy. "Jim had picked up that chicken like he might have picked up a hoe. He broke its neck and he didn't even realize it. He was doing as best he knew and didn't understand why the chickens got all riled. The chickens knew, though. They could tell one of their own was dead, and they panicked. That's what chickens do, you know."
Bellwether allowed a long moment of silence to pass, and when she spoke again, her tone was kindly. "Look at it from where I sit. You're good at seeing things in reports. Your transcriptions of phone calls are right on the money, I hear. But neither one of those is like field work, and when you think about what might happen if something goes wrong... Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you?"
Judy nodded. The folksy story hadn't been necessary to get the point across, but even while she wished Bellwether would give her more meaningful work that would really make a difference, she understood. "You want me to start with something simple, to see how I do."
Bellwether positively beamed. "See, that's why I like you, Judy. Now, make sure you dress the part tonight. You'll stick out like a sore thumb, going into a jazz club looking like that."
The sheep stood up, and Judy took it as her cue to do the same. Before she could so much as get one paw on the doorknob, however, Bellwether spoke again. "There's just one more little thing," she said, her tone almost apologetic.
Judy turned back to face the ewe. "You can question my judgement all you like in your reports," Bellwether said, "Gosh, so long as that door's closed, you can question it all you like in here. But out there?"
Bellwether pointed one hoof towards the main office area. When she continued, all traces of the country warmth and the schoolteacher-like brightness had vanished from the sheep's voice, and her eyes were steely. "You never question my judgement out there. Not in front of the other agents. Not in front of anyone. Understand?"
"I... Yes ma'am," Judy replied, trying to keep her face from showing her emotions while internally she reevaluated her opinion of her boss.
It had seemed to her before that the ewe was a passionate believer in Prohibition, one who took the limited power of her office seriously in the pursuit of what she considered to be right. Now, however, she wondered whether Bellwether cared more about saving face or doing her job. Any further thoughts were cut off by the ewe, who smiled as though nothing had happened. "I'm glad to hear it, Agent Hopps," she said sweetly, "Would you mind sending Agent Ramses in? He owes me a toxicology report."
"Three dollars?" Judy asked, somewhat incredulously.
It had been several hours since Bellwether had called Judy into her office, and she had found it difficult to focus on the meager file she had been given to prepare with. Her assignment was as simple as Bellwether had made it out to be; she was to go to the jazz club and surreptitiously determine whether or not they were serving alcohol. It was perfectly clear, both from those instructions and from her conversation with Bellwether, that she was to attempt nothing else, which was why she found herself standing in front of the Thief of the Night hoping that the Bureau would reimburse her expenses.
The mammal at the door, a thickly built badger, nodded. "A dollar cover and a two drink minimum," he said, sounding bored, "You paying or what?"
At the very least, the badger didn't think she stood out. Judy had taken Bellwether's advice and borrowed some of the clothing that the Bureau of Prohibition maintained for the purpose of disguises (and, she suspected, because some of the agents used the Bureau to pay for clothes they intended to wear only once in their personal lives). She felt absolutely ridiculous, though, dressed as a flapper. Her ears were forced down her back under a little white cloche hat, which matched the rather sheer fabric of her dress. The dress itself contributed the most to her discomfort, as it had a plunging neckline that left her arms completely bare and the hem was only just below her knees. The rest of her discomfort came from the silk stockings, which looped around the arches of her feet so that she wouldn't have to wear shoes with them. The stockings itched abominably, and the thought of having to wobble along in heels would have been a step too far for her. The only part of her clothing that she actually liked was the purple silk sash she had tied around her waist; it matched her eyes and probably cost far more than she made in a month.
Altogether, though, while it might have been the appropriate look for a jazz club, it was completely wrong for Tundra Town. She had been freezing her tail off even on the relatively short walk from the train station to the club, and she wished that she had thought to bring her galoshes. They might not have gone with the dress, but at least it would have kept her toes from making contact with the frozen ground. She was grateful that the file she had been given had contained excellent directions to where the club was located, as she doubted that she would have found it otherwise; the part of Tundra Town that she was in didn't seem to maintain its street lights very well, and in the darkness of night the small sign that read "The Thief of the Night" over a stairwell down into the basement of an otherwise unremarkable building was almost completely invisible.
Judy was eager to get out of the cold and reluctantly pulled a two-dollar bill and four quarters from her purse and paid the badger. Before opening the door, he gave her two wooden tokens, each about the size of a nickel but more than twice as thick. "Your drink vouchers," he said, sounding completely disinterested that she had chosen to pay, "You can buy more inside."
The tokens had the name of the club branded onto one side, while on the other they had five digit numbers; one of them read 69042 and the other 50198. The numbers meant nothing to her, and she kept the tokens loosely grasped in her palm as she made her way into the club. The interior of the Thief of the Night was dimly lit, the low light from a number of shaded lamps filtered through the bluish haze of cigarette smoke that hung in the air. The night, it seemed, was just getting started, for the club was still largely empty; she could easily see from one side of the basement to the other. A long and low bar ran along one of the walls, opposite which, on the far side of the room, was a stage. In between there were a number of small tables and chairs, although the center of the room had been left empty, presumably as a dance floor. The brick walls of the basement had been covered with photographs of what must have been jazz musicians, and Judy noted that a few folding wooden screens had been set up around some of the tables along the walls to provide a little more privacy. The pillars supporting the low ceiling were mostly hidden behind ornamental plants in large copper pots polished to a mirror shine.
Onstage, there was a drum set and a number of other instruments off in the left corner, barely visible in the dim lighting. In the other corner, there was a piano, harshly illuminated by a brilliantly white spotlight. The mammal behind the piano was the only musician onstage at the moment, and though his audience couldn't have been more than about thirty mammals, most of which seemed to be predators more interested in their own low conversations than the live music, he was pouring his heart into his playing. The pianist was a raccoon, somewhat short for his species and oddly pale. It might have been a trick of the light, considering the glare from the spotlight, but she didn't think so; he appeared almost cream colored, and the coloration around his eyes was a pale brown rather than the black typical for his species. The pianist's suit jacket sat crumpled on the piano bench next to him, and the straps of his suspenders hung loosely from the waist of his pants only inches from the ground, his dress shirt open at the throat with an undone green bow tie looped around his neck. His fingers danced across the keys with the surety of experience, calling forth something lively and playful that Judy thought she vaguely recognized as Purrshwin.
If nothing else, Judy thought she would at least enjoy the music while she went about her task, which she saw no reason to delay at. It didn't feel all that much warmer inside the club than it had been outside, and the sooner she finished her assignment the sooner she could leave. Judy sidled up to the bar, which was actually at exactly the right height for her. It was one of the things that she hadn't given much thought to until after leaving Bunnyburrows; there everything had been perfectly sized for bunnies, but in the city most everything was at least a little too short or more commonly a little too tall. She hated having her eye level under the top of a counter as it made her feel like a kit, so she was grateful that, no matter what else she thought of her assignment, it was at least somewhere she was the average height. The bartender was a slim opossum, smartly dressed in a black suit with a matching bow tie. Judy caught his attention and asked what the bar served.
He jerked one thumb over his shoulder, indicating a tin sign on the wall behind the bar. It showed the words "Neighi Served Here" superimposed over an image of a seated horse mare, her skirt provocatively raised to show one stocking to the knee. "Any flavor Neighi you want," he said.
"Is that all?" she asked, doing her best to give her words a coy air.
"Neighi or ice water," the opossum replied, "So what'll it be?"
Judy bit back a sigh. Certainly, she hadn't expected it to be as easy as the opossum willingly offering her alcohol, although that would have made her job a lot easier.
"Ginger ale," she said, giving over one of her drink vouchers.
The opossum efficiently filled a glass with ice and poured the bottle of ginger ale over it, adding a straw with a mild flourish. Judy accepted the glass and positioned herself at one of the small high top tables near to the bar so that she could keep an eye on it without standing out. She was sure that, if the club did serve alcohol, it had something to do with the drink vouchers, and she ran her fingers over the one she had left. Even on closer inspection, nothing about the token stood out. She could see where the wood had been burned by the brand and could feel the slight impression it had left. The numbers on the back, she noted, were not quite even, some a bit high and some a bit low, and the spacing between the numbers wasn't quite regular either. It made her think that they had been added one digit at a time, unlike the logo on the front which must have been branded by a single custom made piece. The wood itself was also unremarkable, a piece of pine that had gone somewhat gray with age and handling.
Since no one had gone to the bar to order a drink after she had, she sipped at her ginger ale and looked around the club, trying to catch anything else that might be a tip off. Perhaps there was a hidden room where alcohol was served or the tokens were intended to be used as signals to the wait staff. She looked around the room as casually as possible, trying to seem like she was just enjoying her drink and the music. The other mammals in the club seemed to be doing the same, but as she scoped out the room her attention was suddenly caught by one of the tables that had a wooden screen part of the way around it. The screen had been set up so that it would not block the view of the stage from the table, and it was only because her own table was closer to the stage than the other that she was able to see the mammal in it. There was no question in her mind, though, that the wolverine, nattily dressed except for the somewhat battered felt hat on the table in front of him, was Thomas "Crazy" Carajou. He looked exactly like the photograph she had seen, enormous and shaggy with a chunk missing from his right ear and a scar on the same side of his muzzle that twisted his mouth upwards into a hideous parody of a smirk. From what she had read, Judy knew that he had once been an enforcer for Mr. Big with a fearsome reputation for the violence he was capable of when his boss demanded it or when the wolverine simply felt like it. After the collapse of Mr. Big's empire, Carajou was suspected to have found work for the gang that ran most of the rackets on the South Side of the city, but there had never been anything positively linking him to having continued a life of crime.
A thrill of excitement ran through Judy, even as Carajou simply sat alone at his table, occasionally sipping at his own drink. Perhaps the wolverine was simply a fan of jazz, but she doubted it. More likely he was at the Thief of the Night on business of some sort, and she imagined what the possibilities could be. Perhaps he was meeting a contact to receive a job, or was waiting for payment for one already completed. It was true that Judy had been told only to determine whether or not the club served alcohol, but any information that she could gather on the wolverine would surely be incredibly valuable, and she could watch him in addition to watching the bar.
As the minutes went past, however, there was no meaningful activity from either. A quarter of an hour passed without anything more exciting than a ferret ordering an orange Neighi from the bar after complaining bitterly about the cost and Carajou sneezing, but Judy maintained her vigil. She was so split between trying to keep an eye and ear on both the opossum tending bar and the wolverine sitting alone that she completely missed the buck who had approached her until he gave a little cough to catch her attention. He was probably about her age, perhaps somewhat younger, dressed in a luxurious coat of turkey feathers that went down so far that his legs couldn't be seen and only the tips of his red and white spectator shoes were visible under the hem. From what she could see of his face and paws, his fur was mostly gray, speckled with red, and he brought with him the vaguely spicy scent of the pomade he had used to slick back the tuft of fur between his long and floppy ears. "Hey there," he said, "You here by yourself?"
The attention was somewhat flattering, even if the buck did strike her as being something of a jelly-bean. He seemed to have a slender build under his enormous coat, and looked like the sort of buck who had never done an honest day's work with his paws in his entire life. Judy's pursuit of her dream to become a police officer had completely precluded her from considering any kind of serious romance; even if she had managed to find a buck who didn't think her dream job was ridiculous (which she hadn't), there were far too many does she had gone to school with who had ended up pregnant by high school or college sweethearts for her to risk it. "I'm waiting for a friend," she said coolly.
"Another doe?" the buck asked hopefully, with what he must have thought a charming smile, "I'm sure she can't be as pretty as you."
"Applesauce," she replied dismissively, although she gave him a small smile of her own in return as her mind raced furiously, "She's no chunk of lead, if you like squirrels."
It had occurred to her that a college age bunny in a jazz club was probably looking for drinks at least as much as he was looking for companionship, and he might be exactly what she needed. The buck seemed blissfully unaware of her thoughts, because he just gave an appreciative little chuckle. "Just bunnies for me," he said, and she saw his eyes dip down the front of her dress before going back up to meet her eyes, as though he had somehow mastered something no other male ever had and could leer at does without them noticing.
"You come here often?" she asked, taking a small sip of her ginger ale through the straw.
The buck laughed. "That's supposed to be my line, I think. I haven't seen you here before."
"Marion Lapis," Judy invented on the spot.
"Charles Redrock," he said, "But folks just call me Red."
"Well, Red," Judy leaned in, "Do you know how a bunny could get something a little... stronger here?"
She held up her glass of ginger ale and gave it a little shake, sending beads of condensation flying off and making the ice cubes inside tinkle musically. Red grinned widely, and leaned in himself, reducing the distance between them to mere inches. "I don't know from nothing," he said playfully, sliding his eyes over her body in a way that made her have to repress a shudder, "But my memory might get a bit better after a dance."
That was something of a problem for Judy. Her trip to the Thief of the Night was the first time she had ever gone to a jazz club and she had no idea how to dance to jazz. Besides, from the way that Red had looked at her she didn't trust the eager buck to keep his paws to himself. That gave her a different idea, though, and she looked up at him. "I didn't come here to dance," she said, and then lowered her voice to a whisper, "My friend won't mind if I leave without her. Did you come here alone?"
The buck's eyes widened and he gave an involuntary glance backwards. Over his shoulder, on the other side of the room, she saw three other mammals who must have been his friends, similarly dressed in flashy coats of turkey feathers. Red swallowed hard, and Judy got the idea that he might not be the cake-eater he was clearly trying to project himself to be. "Nah, my chums won't mind," he said, and she heard a quiver of excitement and anxiety in his voice, "A drink before we blow this place?"
Judy nodded, and Red was practically babbling in his haste to explain how to get one. "You still got one of those tokens? It's real easy like. Those numbers on the back, you just add 'em up, and keep adding until you got one number."
Judy opened her paw to expose her remaining token, and he eagerly grabbed it with clammy fingers and fumbled with it before showing her the side with the numbers. "This one, see? 69042, you just do the math and, um..."
Red trailed off, apparently too occupied with other thoughts to do the mental math before he said, somewhat too loud, "Three!"
In a lower but still excited voice, he continued, "So you just give it over to the bartender with the numbers up and order the ice water and you just say something with the number three in it like, I dunno, 'Did the Sox have three runs today' and you get moonshine on the rocks."
He paused and took a deep breath after his rather extensive run-on sentence, apparently quite eager to get on with it. Judy was rather impressed; it was a reasonably clever way to discreetly serve alcohol. The club could, and probably would, claim that the numbers on the back of the tokens were to prevent mammals from making their own, and it seemed all but impossible for someone to get the code right without knowing it. She wanted to confirm it herself, though, after which it would simply be a matter of figuring out how to lose Red. She was sure that he wouldn't be much of a match for her if push came to shove, but she did want to do her best to follow Bellwether's implied order and not make a scene. "Let's get a drink, then," she said.
As they made their way to the bar, she pretended not to notice the gestures that Red made towards his friends that she caught out of the corner of her eye, although she would have had to have been half-blind not to have noticed the reactions that they gave. At the bar, she followed his instructions exactly (noting, with some amusement, that he hadn't even offered to pay for her drink), even using the same example that the buck had given. The opossum had looked back and forth with a somewhat shifty air, and after he added ice to a new glass he brought it under the bar to fill it from an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid hidden away in a sliding compartment. Even as the bartender set to work to fulfill the order that Red had made after hers, Judy knew she had succeeded; the sharp scent of alcohol coming from her glass was unmistakable. Judy had no intention of drinking it, though, as that would have been extremely hypocritical for a Prohibition Agent; she figured that she could pretend to take a sip and then allow Red to finish it. Considering how large the glasses were and how strong the moonshine smelled, two glasses of hard liquor were probably enough to incapacitate the buck entirely and allow her to leave without him making a scene.
Once they were back at the small table where her glass of ginger ale still sat, though, her plans completely ran out of her mind. Red had said something, but she didn't catch it, as her attention had been captured by what she saw across the room at the table where Carajou had been quietly sitting alone. The wolverine's hat was covering his face and his body and arms were slumped forward across the table. She bolted for his table, as fast as she could, but even before Judy reached the wolverine she knew she was too late. Beneath the other scents that filled the club—the cigarette smoke, the musk of predators, the cheap cologne and perfume—there was something hot and metallic. There was a dark puddle, barely visible in the light of the club, spreading beneath the wolverine's chair, and once she was at his side she saw the source. There were two holes in his shirt, just above where it tucked into his pants. The white fabric was stained crimson and Judy knew what it all meant, but she grabbed his wrist perfunctorily. There was no pulse, and she knew Carajou was dead.
Author's Notes:
Before I get to any of the (many) other comments that I have for this chapter, I'm happy to now have a piece of cover art for this story that SR made for me.
As with my other stories, I am quite grateful to the talented SR for making this for me, as well as accepting payment in the form of baked goods since I'm really not capable of providing monetary compensation. The design is true to what a record might have looked like in 1927; that was long before the invention of Long Play (LP) records, and records of the 1920s were typically 10 or 12 inches in diameter, capable of storing about 3 to 5 minutes of content when played at 78 RPM. Interestingly, no one knows why 78 RPM was chosen; the best guess is that an early phonograph's regulator happened to be able to keep the speed constant at 78 RPM and it was just accepted as the standard. The major advancement in phonographic recording technology in the 1920s was to electrically amplify the signal using vacuum tubes prior to sending it to the stylus that cut the groove into the disc; the earlier recording method relied solely on the sound waves to move a diaphragm connected to the stylus. Electrical recordings therefore offered significantly better sound quality since they could pick up more than just the loudest parts of what was being recorded, and it was common in the time period for records to advertise that they had used the technique. DrummerMax64 came up with George Purrshwin, a pun on George Gershwin, the actual composer of "Someone to Watch Over Me." Gertrude Roarence is a pun on Gertrude Lawrence, a singer who did have a major hit with her recording of the song in 1927. Her version was indeed two minutes and forty-five seconds long, so that part of the label is accurate. Records of the 1920s were essentially limited to one song a side by their short run time, so an actual collection of all the songs that I used as chapter titles in this story would cover a lot of records and would have been ridiculously expensive.
The title of this chapter, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground," comes from a blues song by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded in 1927. The song also has the distinction of having been picked as one of the 27 songs put on the copies of the Voyager Golden Record that the twin space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are carrying with them into interstellar space.
The James Buckanan Federal Building, where the Zootopia Bureau of Prohibition is located, is named as a pun on James Buchanan, the immediate predecessor of Abraham Lincoln. He's widely considered one of the worst Presidents of the United States for his failure to address the divide over slavery or take action upon the secession of the first seven states that would form the Confederate States of America. While the description of the building itself also indicates the low regard for the Bureau of Prohibition in this story, the name is another sign of it.
Open plan offices were quite common in the 1920s; workplace cubicles didn't come into being until the (rather poorly named) Action Office I was marketed in 1964, and even in the 1920s it would be unreasonable to expect a private office for anyone below a management position in most fields.
Rabbit's teeth really do never stop growing, which is why it's important that pet rabbits have something that they can gnaw on to prevent them from getting too long.
The Great War is what WWI was commonly called prior to WWII. Although the war started in 1914, America did not enter the war until 1917. Between 1917 and the end of the war in 1918, a bit less than 5 million Americans served, so an American who served in the war would likely only be in their thirties or forties in 1927. I imagine that the complete exclusion of bunnies from the draft that I mention in the chapter to be analogous to the real world exclusion of women from the draft; my interpretation of the society in this universe is that it's somewhat less sexist than our world but somewhat more divided by species than ours is by race.
Ephesians 5:18 is a real Biblical verse; religious and moral opposition to the drinking of alcohol was the prime driver of Prohibition, and considering the background that I created for this version of Bellwether a cross-stitch of it makes sense as the sort of thing she would have in her office. As with any Biblical verse, different versions provide different translations. Hers would run like the one in the New International Version, which reads, "And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit," as compared to, say, the King James Bible version, which goes, "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit."
The description of what Judy wears to go to the jazz club is a mostly accurate description of what would be fairly typical for a flapper to wear; I think she'd look adorable. She does also have the short and slim build that was in fashion for flappers at the time as well. Really the only tweak that I made that deviates from flapper fashion is that her stockings are designed to be worn without shoes, which seem pretty uncommon in the world of Zootopia. Considering how uncommon shoes are, in addition to her background, I think it makes sense that she wouldn't consider heels. Judy wishing she had worn galoshes is a little joke; one of the commonly, though incorrectly, suggested origins of the word "flapper" was that it started in reference to a trend for teenage girls to wear their galoshes unbuckled so that the straps flapped.
The jazz club is called the Thief of the Night in reference to the fact that all of the mammals who work there are nocturnal, and in the somewhat metaphorical sense of losing a night to the club. It's an example of the spectrum that establishments fell on during Prohibition. There were, of course, plenty of places that didn't serve alcohol whatsoever while it was illegal, and there were speakeasies where alcohol was served openly once you were inside. There were also places like the Thief of the Night, however, that clandestinely served alcohol only to those in the know, which could help them avoid the suspicion of Prohibition Agents. The system of drink tokens that they use is a moderately secure way of ordering alcohol; the term for the kind of math involved is finding the digital root of a number, which I can thank 999 for teaching me. As described, the digital root of a number is a single digit number that you find by continually adding all of the digits of a number together until you arrive at that single digit. Thus, 69042 = 6+9+0+4+2 = 21 = 2+1 = 3. This method has the added bonus of helping to keep mammals from drinking too much, as once you're too drunk to do simple mental math you're cut off.
Neighi is an awful pun on Nehi, a popular American brand of soft drink in the 1920s. Nehi, and thus Neighi, is pronounced "knee high;" the real Nehi really did advertise themselves with images of women lifting their skirt to show one stocking up to the knee. In the Midwestern US, their advertisements also went further, to the extent of having images that consisted of a disembodied woman's leg to the mid-thigh. If that sounds like the famous leg lamp from A Christmas Story, there's a good reason for that; the lamp was inspired by those advertisements. Incidentally, the price that the club charges per drink really is a rip off for non-alcoholic drinks; in the 1920s a bottle of Coca-Cola cost 5 cents.
The weird coats that the college age mammals wear are based off of a real fashion trend in the mid to late 1920s. Coats made out of raccoon fur were all the rage for college students at the time. There was even a song from 1928 called "Doin' the Raccoon" that is in reference to this trend, with tongue in cheek lyrics about the differences in the fad in different parts of the US, including Chicagoans lining theirs with steel on account of all the shootings.
As I've commented several other times for different animal based products, fur coats would obviously not fly for the setting. I figured that a coat of turkey feathers would occupy a similar niche; since only mammals have fur, feathers would be the only practical equivalent for a raccoon fur coat.
Speaking of raccoons, the jazz pianist is a small cameo by Max Thrash, a character created by DrummerMax64. He's a Torch Key Raccoon, a real sub-species of raccoon that really is smaller and paler than other raccoons. Considering that there are currently about 5,000 known species of mammal, I figure that particularly for relatively rare ones most other mammals wouldn't be able to perfectly identify them. The piano piece, incidentally, is "Rhapsody in Blue," so Judy does at least have the artist right.
Carajou is another name for a wolverine, and it was pretty common for gangsters to have nicknames that were sometimes pretty colorful. I don't think I'd want to have any dealings with someone nicknamed Crazy, though. The somewhat boorish Charles Redrock is also named for his species, the Natal Red Rock Hare, and his coloration matches up with what's typical for the species.
"Applesauce," as an exclamation both sounds like something Judy could have used in the movie and was actual 20s slang for "nonsense" particularly in response to flattery. "Jelly-bean" was slang for a guy who dressed sharply to pick up women but was otherwise worthless, which I think describes Redrock perfectly. "Chunk of lead" was slang for an unattractive woman, particularly a student. A "cake-eater" is a ladies man.
As always, I'd love to know what you think, positively or negatively. Thanks for reading!