Frogmouth (19 page)

His face at the botanical gardens had not been for the flamingos, but for the unnecessariness of it. His face had been for the way it had been done.

Hoosier asked quietly, "Do you ever do that? Do policemen ever stop to watch a bird soaring in the air?"

"Who does the killing?"

He was gazing out the window. Hoosier said softly, not to Feiffer but to someone else, maybe himself, "I read Shakespeare. What I like most about him is his humanity, his view of the world not as a series of isolated happenings, but as part of a great scheme, a great wheel of things." He came back, "The killing is done by contract. It's done by a trusted man with a love of animals who knows how to kill cleanly and quickly and whose greatest qualification—" Hoosier said, "It's all crazy! —whose greatest qualification is that he doesn't like doing it so that when he does it we'll all sleep better knowing that he didn't enjoy it!" He pointed stiffly with his index finger out through the aluminum window to one of the low, windowless buildings, "It's done in there. It's a gas chamber and a shooting room and behind it, out of sight, are the incinerators and the pits. It's Auschwitz, I'm Eichmann: what we do we do because it's right and the law and we're following orders. If we let one tainted creature by it would contaminate the entire Colony, so we don't. We do all the paperwork and the prosecutions and we make all the reports in lines and columns and, in the end, all you come to do is have no pity and set your face to people's pleas. You console yourself that the people pleading with you are the ones responsible anyway and it's not your fault, until all, all you have in the end, is just a highly organized, efficient, clean production line dealing in death and incineration and—and
everything
, everything I thought I was going to do in my life—" Hoosier said, touching his face, seeing his own reflection in the window as if Feiffer was no longer there, " 'I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the north; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, "Fie upon this quiet life! I want work." ' I'm a vet! I'm a goddamned vet! I'm a goddamned civil servant!" He was caught, caged as surely as anything in his bonded holding areas. Hoosier said softly, "
Henry the Fourth, Part One
. I can't do anything these days except take refuge in other men's thoughts." He said softly, "All the killing is done by a man called Idris, a Malay. His office is over there near the killing block. You'll find him." He was still staring out the window thinking his own thoughts.

Hoosier said, "We use him to kill because he hates killing. God only knows what he'll make of the flamingos from the Gardens when he has to burn them. He used to go there all the time, I'm told. There and Yat's. He told me once, funnily enough, that what he liked most about Yat's was, of all things, the Wishing Chair." Hoosier said, "We all make wishes."

Hoosier said softly, "He's a little old man with pale eyes from cataracts. You can't miss him. He's got bad skin cancer of the face. On hot days he carries an umbrella everywhere to shade himself." He tried to concentrate, but it was impossible.

He advised Feiffer curtly, "Go ask Idris. He was the one who, with his lethal chambers, put an end to everyone's doubts about the frogmouth." He said with sudden anger, "Go and ask him about your bloody feather!"

From the gas pipes, there was only the faintest whistling sound of air or wind. O'Yee ordered Lim, "Get Hurley on the phone! I want to know where the old gas pipes lead." He answered his own question. "They lead away under the streets!" O'Yee ordered Lim, "Get a metal detector!"

Dialing the numbers quickly and without mistake, Lim got Hurley. Lim said in a whisper as O'Yee took the phone from him to talk, "I'll be back in ten minutes."

It was 8:28
A.M.
An hour ago he hadn't been able to get a screwdriver. An hour ago, he hadn't heard the wall scream. As O'Yee began talking quickly on the phone to Hurley, Lim paused. He looked at the wall one last time. He touched hard at the butt of his gun in his holster.

He went to get a metal detector.

They were coming. At 8:29
A.M.
as the Russo Harbin Hong Kong Trading Bank got ready to open its doors and its autobank for the day's business, the thieves with feet like dinner plates were coming.

Somewhere someone was pushing the first .177 air pellet into his air gun and breaking the barrel down to cock it.

In the gunsmoke drifting range of Auden's mind, all the shooting stopped and there was silence.

8:30
A.M.

There was a click from his time lock. There was a shiver from his feet. In one of the synapses of his brain there was a single spark. It was the spark that told him he was a .577-500 Number 2 Express bullet. It was all the information he needed from the synapses.

He was ready.

He quivered.

He had decided.

He
knew
.

"
We were strolling along . . . On moonlight bay
. . ."

Wrong synaptic spark.

Auden, all bone and muscle, cutting out his brain and turning solely to the only friend he had, his central nervous system, said in a low snarl, "Grrrr . . ."

Down on his haunches in Annapura Lane, Spencer, staring hard across to the glass doors of the bank, watched as Ivan and Sergei, Natasha and Igor and all the rest of them went about their business setting up the day's transactions.

He watched, his eyes glued to their every movement.

Spencer said softly, "Hmm . . ."

He watched, and waited, and wondered.

8:30
A.M.
exactly.

He saw the smoked glass window on the keyboard of the autobank against the wall of the bank open for the first customer of the day.

He watched as the first customer of the day, a tall Northern Chinese carrying a briefcase, came down the street unsuspectingly to use it.

In the Detectives' Room, O'Yee shouted down the line to Hurley, "What do you mean you don't know where it goes? You're writing a history of the Hong Kong Police—this is Hong Kong Police gas pipe!
Where the hell does it go?
"

It went north. He heard Lim coming in. He heard Lim banging something metal on the edge of the Charge Room desk as he dragged it. O'Yee, slamming down the phone on Hurley, demanded, "Yes? Yes? Have you got it?"

He had it. God only knew where, but he had it in his hand. It was in a long cardboard box marked
TREASURE FOR PLEASURE— DETECT YOUR WAY TO UNTOLD RICHES
. O'Yee shouted, "Right! Good!"

From the wall there was only a soft whistling sound.

All thumbs, O'Yee, wrenching the box from Lim's hands, got it up on his desk to tear it open and assemble the thing.

He heard—

He thought he heard—

The whistling stopped. The wall said softly, ". . . twenty . . . twenty-eight."

He had the box open. It was 8:31. It had no batteries. O'Yee shouted, "Get batteries!"

Good old Lim. You could always rely on him.

At top speed, running out of the room again without a word of complaint, Lim went to get batteries.

At the door to the killing chamber, Hoosier said in a gasp, "My God!" He had wanted to stay in his office after Feiffer had gone. He could not. At the door to the killing chamber, Hoosier, rooted to the spot, said, "Feiffer—Chief Inspector?
Are you here?
"

Everything was smashed. On the little narrow-gauge tram track they used to push the cages down along the line of side-mounted forty-four-gallon oil drums converted to gas chambers there were cages, boxes, bits and pieces of mechanism. The shooting trough at the far end of the room by the furnaces had been twisted: the bars had been bent and smashed down with a sledgehammer. The hammer had been used on the killing drums themselves. Three of the row of five lay on their sides with their hinged metal doors hanging off their hinges—they had been hit over and over and mangled like aluminum beer cans. He saw the line of poison gas cylinders behind the drums. They were on their sides. He sniffed. They were intact. He could not see Feiffer anywhere. He saw the open steel door of the furnace. It was scarred, marked as if someone, again and again, had beaten it with something hard and then, failing to break it, had turned to the masonry around it. There was dust from masonry everywhere: it was like a carpet. The walls had been holed. They had been smashed to their bricks and rendering. Hoosier called urgently, "Feiffer!" There was a trolley for one of the gas cylinders upside down in the center of the shooting trough where the drain was. There were cages in the killing trough and cardboard boxes for the transport of smaller animals. The transport dolly was bent and broken with one of its wheels hanging off. Hoosier said, "Feiffer! Are you there?" He heard a noise, a click, then a humming and then another click. Hoosier, going forward into the room, watching the poison gas cylinders in case they rolled or fractured, called, "
Feiffer—!
"

It was hot. In the room, the air-conditioning unit had been smashed. It had been a plastic box on the wall. Its sides had been stoved in. Its fan unit lay near the open furnace with the beaten-in wire and cardboard cages. He heard the hum. It was coming from Idris's office to one side of the furnace. Hoosier, his shoes crunching on masonry and wooden laths from the wall as he walked, went toward the office.

He saw Feiffer in there by a Xerox machine. The machine was the only thing left standing in the office. Hoosier, looking at the turned-over desks and filing cabinets and, again, the smashed-in walls, demanded, "What the hell's happened?" He sniffed. He could not smell gas. He saw the open arms locker on the wall behind the overturned and splintered desk. He counted the rifles and humane killers. Hoosier said with his civil servant's mind, "There's a pistol missing, a Webley .455 Mark Six revolver." The humming was the Xerox machine. Feiffer had turned it on. Hoosier shouted, "Did you hear me?" Hoosier, looking around, still sniffing, demanded, "What the hell happened?"

"You tell me."

"I haven't been here for a week. We haven't had to kill anything for—" There was a faint smell. Hoosier said in terror, "Gas!"

"It's the machine." It was on, humming, a faint smell of ammonia and warm treated paper about it. Feiffer said tightly, "It was still on when I got here. It was printing. All the paper had run through and it was still printing." Feiffer, looking up from the machine, asked with a strange look on his face, "Is there a way Idris could have gotten in and out of the compound without anyone seeing him?"

"There's a back gate."

"And, like executioners all over the world, the prison prefers him to come and go unnoticed through it. Am I right?"

He was going to say— Hoosier said tightly, "Yes."

"When was the last time there was a killing in this place?"

"The last time was the frogmouth—"

He had smelled the carbolic on the floor the moment he had come in. The smell of ammonia from the Xerox machine overlaid it. Feiffer said savagely, "Then why the hell do the furnaces have dust in them? Why the hell are the poison gas cylinders all jammed tight and rusted? Why the hell—" Feiffer shouted in the ruined, wrecked room, "Why the hell didn't anyone ever come in here and check? Where the hell's your unbreachable Civil Service order and conveyor belt system?" Feiffer said, "The trough was the only thing that looked clean! The only thing that's been going on in here for months is the shooting of dogs and cats! Nothing's been gassed in your goddamned bird-gassing chambers for weeks, maybe months!" He had put paper in the loading cartridge of the Xerox machine. It began to print. Feiffer, yanking the first copy out and shoving it toward Hoosier, ordered the man, "Here! You know so much about what goes on in here! You have all the morality of it all worked out to your own satisfaction! You know what sort of kind, thoughtful, gentle, merciful man Idris is—
read this
!" He had killed too. In the course of the last five years he had killed four times. He knew what killing cost. He knew what people thought about you. Feiffer, his face contorted, yelled, yanking more of the papers out of the storage bin and throwing them in a cascade into Hoosier's face, "There are plenty of copies! Read this!"

NORTH POINT WOMAN IN DEATH FALL
Wrote Last Letter To Husband

It was a tiny clipping from a newspaper, from something minor, unimportant: judging by the little line box it had been printed in, something hidden away on page 18 or 20.

Police are treating as suicide the death last night of Mrs. Mata Idris, 51, who fell from the balcony of her eighth floor apartment in the New China Housing Estate block in Pottinger Street, North Point.

A police spokesman at North Point Station said that Mrs. Idris had been under a doctor's care for some time and had been treated for depression for several months prior to her death.

The spokesman said that the police were not seeking any other person in connection with the death and that no suspicious circumstances were involved.

The spokesman confirmed that police had taken possession of a letter left in the apartment block by Mrs. Idris for her husband, but declined to reveal its contents.

The clipping had been pasted onto a sheet of foolscap paper and placed in the machine to print.

It had printed. During all the destruction and the blows from the sledgehammer it had printed. It had gone on printing until the entire ream of 500 sheets of paper in its loading cartridge had been exhausted.

With the new paper in the cartridge it went on printing now.

It was merely a few lines of an unimportant story centered on a thirteen-by-eight-inch sheet of blank foolscap Xerox paper.

In the office, Feiffer, for some reason unable to control himself, yelled, "
Read it! Read it!
" He had seen him. He had seen him standing there at the edge of the lagoon. He had seen his pain. He had seen him.

The machine, humming, was printing, printing. It was printing the story over and over again.

He had seen him. He had seen the small, old man with pale eyes who loved animals and killed them, who thought of wishing chairs and who, like Hoosier—not like Hoosier at all—wished, and who, all his days in this awful place was alone. Feiffer shrieked, "
Read it!
"