City At The End Of Time (3 page)

The window of the nearest car rolled down and an elderly woman smiled and held out a one-dollar bill. A whiff of gardenia and stale cigarettes curled out with the warm air. He blinked but did not move. The elderly woman scowled and pulled in her arm.

The light turned green.

The beggar shoved his hands into his pockets, allowing this body to show him where the important things were—the motions its muscles made every day. Filthy fingers clenched a wad of cash. He withdrew a plastic bag containing a tight roll of ones, a five, and some change. On the opposite corner stood a woman in layers of sweaters and vests and a long skirt over faded jeans. Her fuzzy, cherry-cheeked doll’s head poked up from a smudged collar. Her arms and legs resembled a bundle of sticks wrapped in felt. She clutched a sign asking for money, but ignored the one driver who had stopped and waved a dollar bill out the window. The driver honked. She seemed to wake up, snatched his money, and the car veered right to merge with the traffic on the freeway.
Cheap bastards. Dollar bills. You eat nothing but burgers and hot dogs and feel your gut rot.
Daniel wasn’t wearing glasses, but even across the intersection, he had clearly made out the denomination. He felt the bridge of his nose, cringing at the touch of his grimy fingers. No creases—no mark where glasses had ever perched. This body, whatever its problems, boasted decent eyesight. In every strand Daniel had visited, he—and all the other Daniels—had been plagued with miserable eyes—but good health. Fingernails—on these hands, worn and encrusted, but not bitten to the quick. All Daniels bit their nails.

Except for the money in the bag, his pockets were empty. No wallet. No ID. The dirty woman turned to stare at him. But she was not scary—not part of the awful, silent party. He felt an urgent need to get to a bathroom, but where? No Porta-Potties in sight. He thought he knew where he lived—a dozen blocks or so west, in Wallingford—but doubted he would make it, given the snake twitch in his bowels. Still, he had to try. The last thing he wanted was to fill his pants during his first hour in a strange new world.

He reached back, grabbed the knapsack, coat, and bottle, and took off at a run, having
jaunted
just far enough that theWALK sign flashed without the push of a button.

Several cars braked, almost hitting him—but none did.

One thing’s the same. I still have the knack. Better living through physics.
He broke into a jerky, knee-slamming run.

CHAPTER 4

Seattle

The clouds filled in and rain grayed the pavement. He liked this city. It reminded Max Glaucous of London, where he had been born and where as a boy he helped catch and sell songbirds—plentiful bullfinches, hardy goldfinches, delicate linnets sweeter than canaries. Glaucous still likened himself to a bird-catcher—a plump, finicky bird-catcher. He had spent most of his

life moving in the night across England and the United States from city to flyspeck town to city again, casting his net and waiting with infinite patience for the rarest, the most correct sort of feathery morsel; unwilling to snare and deliver to his employers just any bird, for that would be unworthy of his craft—and could also bring a fatal conclusion to his long and benighted existence. His employers sometimes stationed two or more collectors in the same region, the same city. Place and privilege did not matter to them. And then it behooved him to find and eliminate the competition, usually not a difficult task; so many had been recruited lately, and rarely did Glaucous encounter anyone with his experience.

And so here he was, answering an ad in a newspaper—not
his
ad—striding up Fifth Avenue as if he had any business going out by day: a short, broad, hard-packed man of indeterminate years. He wore a salesman’s gray suit over a plain white shirt. A black tie cinched his thick neck like a noose. Sweat beaded on his pale, pocked face. He paused in the shade of a long theater overhang and removed a kerchief from his pocket. His hands were thick and strong and he curled his fingers to hide scarred knuckles. The air was cool but the day’s low deck of clouds had opened a fissure, and he did not like the sun. Its warmth and glow on the wet street reminded him of things lost—among them, his capacity to have regrets. The brightness shone into his small black eyes and illuminated spaces in his head like gaps in a shelf of old books.

Nostrils flared in his broken, pudgy nose. Eyes half closed, handkerchief back in its pocket, hands resting on a slender black hook-cane, Glaucous saw as on a magic lantern scrim the old donkey cart stacked high with nets and wicker cages and hung with baskets of heavy iron stars, to weight the nets; the call-bird linnet, muzzy in its small wire coop on the board beside the old crookback catcher; spring’s early morning dark draped over the streets like a towel over a cage. Young Max’s teacher and only family grimaced and plotted which fields to visit and how far to roam. That time of year they usually traveled to Hounslow for bullfinches.

He had listened to his crippled master’s soft words while tying the ropes, stumbling about half asleep on the broken cobbles. He rode the bouncing tail of the cart, staring pig-eyed at violet dawn. Later in the day, on the journey back to London and the waiting shops, Max plucked gray and brown feathers from the nets and balanced the flap-riot baskets, their hundreds of cheeping new captives slowly but steadily falling quiet, bunching like chicks and squeezing shut their frightened eyes. Many of the birds succumbed to shock before ever they were cooed by sentimental housewives. It was his job to pull the dead and dying and toss them to the hedgerows or the gutters. Sometimes, in town, sleek brown rats humped and danced between the cart’s wheels, and feasted.

In a stuffy basement room, the crookback trained Max to pipe bullfinches, using shrouds and starvation to subdue the new birds, then exposing them to call whistles that sugared the dismal air, with brief shafts of sun and food as reward. In this way, he taught the little creatures by rote to trill London’s most popular tunes.

The bird-catcher had died of consumption after sixty pain-filled years. Before the catcher’s estranged son kicked Max out of the small angled hovel they called home, Max had freed the last of their stock—raised the wicker doors and shooed a week’s glean into smoky skies. His final act of charity. Glaucous had last visited the old crookback’s favorite birding grounds after the opening of the Hounslow

Barracks train station, curious but saddened to see the once familiar fields covered over with lanes, yellow brick houses, small gardens. After all these years so much had changed, yet things were much the same for him; still hunting and delivering young creatures to self-assured gents and their Lady. But this Lady—the Chalk Princess—was no mere woman.

The morning air was much the same, anyway.

Pocketing his kerchief, Glaucous sucked flame into a small pipe, flipped the match, and left the awning’s shade. He walked south, away from the shining wealth of blue-green glass, red and gray stone, concrete and steel—away from the bustle of young office workers and closer to the haunts of those with empty eyes and outstretched hands. All cities the same, rain or shine—prosperity and wealth pressing down on blinding need.

Glaucous took a professional interest in some of the dwellers that stood or squatted like dusty dolls on the sidewalks—scammers, jongleurs, sharps, the gypsy draggle of every big city. He paid particular attention to the young ones. Some of these could be Chancers or Shifters, unaware of their low-grade talents—but still of interest, especially if they began to dream.

Unlike London, at a brisk walk one could actually cross downtown Seattle east to west in less than an hour, working the streets—though he preferred to sit in his apartment and wait. The bird-catcher’s patient facade, so deceptively like repose.

He found the gray Mercedes in a dingy pay parking lot, its rear windows golden with smoke, the dash littered with twelve receipts, one for each day. Sharp fingernails had clawed paths through the soot near the door locks. So it was true: the Chandler and his incendiary partner were in town. Turning east, Glaucous paused to stare at building numbers, until he found the entrance to the Gold Rush Residential Hotel. Here he stopped, tapped his cane, and let out his breath in a low, contemplative moan. Beyond the heavy glass door, pinched between an Oriental antiques shop and an abandoned secondhand store, the hotel’s narrow lobby proffered a dusty, coffee-colored hospitality. Thick paint smothered undecorated walls and lay dirty and cracked over plaster moldings. Two square brown couches and an old chair waited vacant and worn around a cigarette-scarred black table. The table carried stacks of
The
Stranger
and
The Seattle Weekly
, cut bundle-strings dangling. A middle-aged clerk ambled out of his retreat behind the desk and checked out Glaucous, who nodded pleasantly, as if they had met before. “Do you have a Mr. Chandler in residence?” he asked. “I believe he’s expecting me.”

The clerk scowled. “Use the house phone or just go on up,” he said. London—barbed nest for all its poor fledglings—had soon pricked young Max into a burly squint, low, lashed, and ugly. After the death of the bird-catcher, the twelve-year-old, dumped on the streets once again, proved himself a fair hand at penny-toss and cards. Hunger and inexperience led to street fighting, where he acquired scarred knuckles, puffed ears, and three bends in the bridge of his nose. In a music-hall riot, one hard roll down a flight of stone steps dealt the final knock to his bulldog physique,

stunting his growth at five-four. Few would tangle with such a glowering brute, and so within a few months he secured work as a bodyguard for well-heeled gents possessed by hungers that would not be sated: cards, whoring, the Fancy. The things and events he now witnessed and the deeds he was called upon to perform were more awful than any he had seen as a bird-catcher’s boy. Clients, associates, and their enemies came to refer to him by a variety of epithets: dandyshield, bone-smith, batbreak, fistfolly; cane snipe, johnny-brute. In two years he learned to keep his mouth shut and skim what he could while his employers lolled senseless with drink or drug.