This observation releases a flurry of competing theories and prescriptions in the room, all strident, each sickeningly familiar, and every one feckless and futile. Throughout the fray, the motley lecturer waits patiently, leaning on his improvised podium. At last, the room falls into an exhausted lull. The Bürgermeister asks the man, this unwashed illegal immigrant whom not one of them knows from Adam, "Tell us, then. We beg you. What's our problem?"
The stranger smiles, savoring the served-up moment. He flips another piece of parchment on the easel, and pronounces the flamboyantly displayed word. "Rats."
The council is too stunned at first to respond. Then they produce the obligatory, derisive laughter. "Rats?"
"Rats. Any of the diverse, murine species of rodent…"
The Bürgermeister snickers nervously. "How can rats be the problem? Paderborn has rats."
"And Goslar!" an indignant Joachim snaps, secretly pleased with following the syllogism.
"Yes," the stranger concedes. "But neither of them has rats quite like Hamelin."
Quickly, before he loses shock's initiative, he produces a slew of explanatory graphics. Vermin population's impact on food reserve depletion. On depreciation of real estate — sewers, cellars, road bed, new housing starts. Increase in disease; costs to health, education, and welfare. Loss to tourist income and investment from abroad. "None of the effects, taken separately, is disastrous. But taken together, they create a threshold effect, preventing the town from reaching economic takeoff."
The leading lights of Hamelin confer among themselves. In the absence of any more-likely explanation, they are inclined to except the causal mechanism. Besides, the stranger has all the figures at his disposal, and who at this late a date would dare to be so medieval as to dispute statistics?
Discussion wheels from cause to countermeasures. The commander of the Archers' Guild says to leave it to his troops. With a systematic program of superior firepower, smart targeting, and will, they can have the little brown problem licked by fall of '89.
"But do we have until fall of '89?" the Bürgermeister asks. The stranger only shrugs.
The head of the exchequer comes down for a massive importation of cats, picked up in bulk quantities on the spot market. Others object, pointing out: (A) The unlikelihood of being able to secure sufficient felines to turn the trick. (B) The unavailability of foreign exchange credits sufficient to foot such a venture. (C) The subsequent expense of securing a similar consignment of corrective and compensatory canines.
Local ingenuity is soon exhausted. The council has no other recourse but to turn again to the stranger and ask for his recommendation. "Genus Rattus" the stranger carefully explains, "is a perverse animal. It's no good reasoning with him. He will go on proliferating until the bottom drops out of the entire self-supporting system. He will extend his success until it buries all competition and pulls down his hosts on top of him. He possesses too much native smarts for most traps. Poison is too good for him. Nor is he sufficiently God-fearing to respond to religious urging. In fact, there is only one thing the rat will listen to."
He waits until begged. Then he discloses the word with the perfect timing of a free-marketeer. "Music."
One half of the council explodes with cries of fraud and nonsense. The other remains skeptically purse-lipped. The abbot's man alone corroborates: he once saw his aunt Agatha sing a trio of baby-gnawers into contrite squeaklessness for the length of three antiphonal treatments of the Kyrie.
The stranger withdraws from his satchel the strangest-looking flûte à bec ever to appear along the Weser. It is tiny, more of a narrow ocarina than a pipe, its cylinder a slight, silversmithed figure with finger holes running the length of its gown. "I'm afraid this is all I have by way of résumé. But I guarantee that I will rid you of all problems with it, or you will owe me nothing."
"And how much will we owe you if you succeed?" the shrewd Bürgermeister asks. The piper grins at him strangely and names a figure just slightly below the total hard-currency reserves of the entire Northern Marches. Said fee provokes all manner of sneaky sidelong council looks. They couldn't possibly pay anything near that amount; it is fiscally unrealizable, as the quarterly reports put it.
And yet, they will pay that much now, or they will pay a good deal more over the long haul. The council bows its collective head with the helplessness of a public official caught over a pork barrel. The Bürgermeister coughs casually. "Fine. No problem. Your terms. Plus a healthy bonus for finishing the job quickly."
Only the blundering Stone Dresser, thickheaded with integrity, holds out. "But we were saving our money. We need it to finish the basilica."
The Bürgermeister takes a deep breath and adopts his best patronizing campaign voice, saved for idiots, children, and the obstinately underprivileged. "We've been working on that church for the last two centuries, son. It'll keep for another couple lifetimes." In the casual tones of all weak-hand negotiators, the mayor reiterates that the piper will not get paid a single pfennig until the town has been demonstrated rat-free by an objective, third-party fact-finding commission. The piper agrees, again eerily amused.
On the day of the promised purge, the piper requests that all the bells in town tear off an absurdly long peal. Colliding carillons of all colors and creeds bang away blithely on teeth-freezing, diabolical sevenths. A first, tentative, pioneering rat-beak peeks cautiously from out of its cellar bunker. Others follow the lead, appearing from between wattle holes and out of drainpipes, curious to learn how long that leading-tone agony can persist before resolving to tonic. When the bells break off abruptly without resolution, the exposed rodents reel as if hit over the head with an unlicensed glockenspiel mallet.
The piper then takes up a strategic stand in the middle of the Marktplatz and produces his seraphic, silversmithed tube. He announces the first piece on his program — an onomatopoeic panpipe idyll by some Frenchman that not a single one of the beasts has ever heard of. But from the first plaintive, impossible modal tones, they are done for. The mimetic ditty, swelling like rapids in a rising river, foamy and expectant with near-narrative, soul-ravishing ripples, builds to a perpetually postponed, eternally almost announcement of new arrival, that long-awaited descent of formal ecstasy.
It visits again, for every creature that has ears to hear. How big the place is, how strangely familiar beyond saying. The interval field fills with drumlins and rifts, chord-catches that flare free of polities' darkening penumbra. The piece hints of cross-border calls for help, the membrane embrace, a fate that these notes, like dutiful parents, refuse to do more than allude to in front of the offspring, the underaged. Music — the choking scold of closeness, the basilica at funds' end— again sounds its insistence that soul is headed somewhere, forever caught in midpassage, in leap's parabola as it pitches from the burning structure, abandoned to the airy apotheosis it was fixed upon from the first, no matter what temporary and transient panic snags it on its way back to ground level.
One fat brown rat, suckered by the rabbit punch of that sweet outpouring of tones, creeps halfway from safety, the better to hear explanation's up-close whisper. Her next of kin — squeaking in holy terror, Get back, you fool; don't be insane—stop in midsqueal and cock their own conical little heads, puzzled by a poignant, dimly recognized, still-discernible invitation that nestles in the notes. Belong and be lost. The tune reads like one of those misplaced love letters at last delivered to the forgetting door just up the avenue, generations after its intended has died.