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that, now?”
    “Fourteen, sir.” Holy Musrum!
    “Fine. Five crowns each, as usual? That’s, uh...”
    “Seventy crowns, Mr. The Fox, sir.”
    “Come on to my office and I’ll get the money for you.”
    “Mr. The Fox, sir, why don’t you take one more, as a bonus? The last child? As my gift, as a, a kind of thank-you? Make it fifteen altogether.”
    “A bonus? Free, you mean? No charge? That’s very generous of you, Gerber, quite generous, but I don’t know that I really need fifteen.”
    “Please, sir. I’d consider it an honor,” and one less mouth to feed, not that he would have fed it for long.
    “Well...all right, if you insist.”
    The fifteenth infant was, of course, our heroine.
    Mr. Gerber received his seventy crowns and disappears from our history, concerning us no more than the fate of the remainder of his stock, which, the reader will readily appreciate, is just as well.
    Judikha received her name strictly as a matter of expediency. She was flanked, alphabetically, by Joram, Jorilla and Jotham on one side, and Jugutha, Jumel and Jumieges on the other. Pilnipott got the names from a book, 10,000 Perfect Names for Baby , which he had stolen the very same week he had first started his enterprise, and was methodically working his way through it. It made no difference to The Fox whether the gender of the names was appropriate: a child received his or her name in the order in which they came, to do otherwise was a niggling detail upon which Pilnipott did not wish to waste time. Probability came to the rescue of most of the students who received names that were, if not particular sonorous, were at least appropriate. Still, there were husky male criminals named Dolores and Cissy and delicately feminine miscreants named Bruto and Edouard, but Pilnipott reasoned that this just made them tougher.
    Judikha was at this time, of course, too young to be particularly interested in her surroundings, let alone her name. This did not particularly matter, since her surroundings did not change in all the time she was to remain under Pilnipott’s care. They were no different on the day she arrived then they were ten years later. The operation had established an efficient status quo long before her arrival and Pilnipott saw no reason to ever change it. He had created a fine machine that with very little attention methodically transformed useless, unwanted babies into productive, money-generating criminals and like any good engineer he wasn’t about to tamper with what was already perfect. The machine remained unchanging and the children were nothing more than the raw material that passed through it.
    All of the children lived together, regardless of age or sex, in a kind of barracks-nursery. As the first class became older, they were put in charge of the younger, and so on until, after several years, there was established an iron-clad order of society and responsibility. This relieved The Fox’s mother, if she was his mother, of considerable burden.
    Pilnipott, with his usual careful organization, had arranged the loft somewhat on the plan of an assembly line, with the newest infants at one end of the room and the oldest children at the other, with the remainder graded between according to age. The rows of wooden cots, placed only a couple of feet apart, were not unlike the conveyor belt of an assembly line, with raw material continuously pouring in one end and a finished product coming off the other. Every year, as the infants became old enough to begin their formal training, the two-year-olds moved to the next row of beds further down the room, the three-year-olds to the next and so on. The oldest children, of nine or ten, having no beds to move to, were therefore “graduated” and forced to find lodging outside the school, in whatever way they could, though their ties to The Fox were of course expected to be no less stringently observed.
    Judikha’s earliest unambiguous memories were from the age of two or three