Frogmouth (21 page)

What a fine fellow was Ranjit. Auden, grinning, yelled, "Sherpas have better balance than people with long legs!"

"You noble fellow!" The Tibetan yelled, "Someone's going to shoot me any second because I've got the money!"

"If they shoot you they shoot me too!" Auden, not noble, but positively illustrious, yelled, "Give me half the money!" He reached out. He felt the warmth of comradeship. He touched at the Sherpa's hand. It wasn't even perspiring. Neither was his own. (Auden said, "Ha, ha.") He took half the money. Auden dared the world, "Shoot him and you shoot me!" Auden at one with the world, yelled, "Ha!" Auden, suddenly shot in the arse, yelled, "OH!"

He saw Auden stagger. He had some of the money. He saw the Tibetan reach over and take the money back. Someone shot him too. He saw the Tibetan stagger. He saw Auden grab for him, hold him, set him upright.

Spencer, running back and forth in the street, reaching the garbage skip and leaping up to see inside it, yelled to no one, maybe to the mass of barefooted runners collapsing one by one on the steps with exhaustion as nothing—nothing—stopped the Tibetan and Auden, shrieked, "I can't find him! I can't work out who gets the profit because it all gets repaid by the bank after they've counted it and I—"

The bank. In the bank, Ivan and Natasha and Sergei and the rest of them counted the money.

The bank!

No one else checked their count because Mr. Nyet wasn't there! The Pan Asia Games. What the hell did people play in the Pan Asia Bank Officers' Games? What were bank tellers good at?

On the hill, the Tibetan, shot again, said clearly, "Ugh!" His friend Auden reached for him.

Pistol shooting! They played pistol shooting!
He looked up to the roof of the bank. It was flat. He looked through the glass doors into the bank. It was empty. He looked for the tall Northern Chinese who had been robbed. He was gone.

Spencer, cracking it, solving it, feeling pleased with himself, yelled out to encourage him, "Phil! I worked out who's doing it! It's the bank staff! They're claiming more of the money was stolen than was stolen and they're paying out the full amount from the bank's money as restitution!" It was all so neat once you knew. "They're claiming only probably half as much was recovered as we recovered—each time—and they're putting the difference aside—stealing it—to send themselves to the Pan Asia Bank Officers' Games because they're the best bank air pistol shooting team in the Colony!"

They were. On the roof, aiming carefully, the bank pistol shooting team, shooting up the hill, began shooting both Auden and the Tibetan simultaneously.

The caretaker got the door open. He recoiled. He had never smelled it before, but in the room, as Feiffer moved him to one side and went in with his gun drawn, he smelled death.

They were gone. The last of the barefooted hordes had fallen down crimson-faced and gasping for air on the steps like fish and they were alone. They were three steps from the top of the hill. Shot, Auden yelled, "Urk!"

Two steps away. The Tibetan, staggering, blood running from a pellet wound on his lower back, said pitifully, "Ark!"

One step away. Auden, taking a pellet in the leg, said, "Oh—" He slowed. He began to stop. The last, the final step, the summit seemed to be moving away, his little flag destined never to fly there, his—

"Mmm!" It was the Sherpa. It was Ranjit. He was his truest and best friend. If he would not be there on the top with him then the top was no good and he did not want it. Auden, at the last foothill, the last piton, the last giant step for mankind before the summit, stopped. In
The Red Badge of Courage
, the dying man had passed on the flag to The Boy. The Sherpa was going, falling, collapsing, sinking to his knees. He looked up to the top of the hill—to the last step—and there he saw his home and his family so near, so far . . . going away, failing in the light that burned. The Sherpa said, "Here . . ."He raised up his hand with the money in it, "See that it gets . . ."

He was up the stairs inside the bank to the roof. On the roof the shooters were running down the fire escape into the street. Spencer, ten yards behind them, yelled, "Nijamba!" They took no notice. Even Natasha. Still carrying her Feinwerkbrau .177 caliber target air pistol in her hand, she went over the wall and into the street like a mountain goat. Spencer yelled, "
STOP!
"

Say not that the struggle naught availeth. The Light was failing. The Torch was being handed from one passing runner to another. On the step at the summit of the hill, the Sherpa, blood running from his flesh wounds, out of step, hope, family and puff, said in a strangled voice, "Phil, what a day we had . . . What a—"

It was the finest moment of his life. Auden said with nobility and illustriousness dripping from every pore, every atom in his body, "Ranjit, to conquer without you the World would say was a great victory for the endurance of man. To me, it would be but dried grass blowing in the wind."

"Thank you, Phil." His eyes shone with devotion for his Captain.

"Here. The honor is yours." Sir Gawain, he lifteth his good trusty Squire up.

"Nijamba!"

They ran.

Spencer yelled, "STOP!"

They ran.

Spencer, drawing his Detective Special and letting go in a blast all six shots at once into the air, yelled, "Stop, please."

They stopped.

Even Natasha. Spencer shook his head in disappointment looking at her. Natasha said, dropping her air pistol with the rest in the middle of the road, "Don't shoot—"

It wasn't Natasha. It was Sergei. He had the deeper voice.

"
Phil! I've got them all down here and you've got the Tibetan!
"

Auden said in a quiet voice, "He's a Sherpa. He climbs mountains." One step away. He helped Ranjit to his feet. In all his life no one had ever called him noble before. Auden said, "He's going home." He helped him take the step. He stood on the summit.

From the street Spencer yelled, "What?" Spencer yelled, "
He's got the money!
"

"He needs the money." Auden, holding Ranjit by the wrist, pushing him up, wiping away with his free hand the blood from the wounds of his battle, said firmly, "Go."

"Thank you, Phil.".

Auden said softly, "Go."

"
How the hell are we going to get the money back if you let him go?
"

Ranjit, nodding, had no words.

Auden said curiously, calling down from the mountain, "I don't know really, Bill. Do you think you'd be up to running after him and catching him?"

He sat down as Ranjit, looking back, went around the corner of the hill and disappeared.

He kept himself fit.

He kept himself noble.

It was the greatest moment of his life. Sitting down, he put his fingers in his ears so Spencer, hopping up and down and shouting far below on the flatlands, could say nothing, nothing at all, to spoil it . . .

H
e was still traveling north, turning into Singapore Road toward North Point. In his ears the metal detector was pinging a strong, unbroken signal at the three-foot-six level. On the controls on the handle O'Yee, moving the squelch button, tightened the sound until it was a continuous whine. He had his eyes fixed firmly on the pavement watching the detector dish as it swept for sounds. Really, people were very good. As they saw him coming and realized something was afoot they got quickly and without demur completely out of his way.

Behind him, tracing the course on a street map, Lim was also very good.

A lot of Chinese cops in full uniform following a Eurasian with a metal detector through the streets they had grown up in would have been embarrassed.

Not good old Lim. He was made of sterner stuff. He didn't know the meaning of the word embarrassed.

Behind him, at the top of his voice, Lim yelled over and over, "Bomb squad! Communist bombs planted in the street!" He kept tapping at his nameplate as he shouted, "P.C. Lim—local boy! No risk too great to keep you all safe!"

Really, the way people ran to give you room to work was very good. It gave you hope for the future of civilization.

The deafening whine changed pitch and O'Yee, stopping in the street, swept the pavement carefully to bring it back to strength.

NORTH POINT WOMAN IN DEATH FALL
Wrote Last Letter To Husband

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 New China Housing Estate block in Pottinger Street, North Point.

It was the redness. It was the redness on the paper, over and over and over as the machine spilled out the words.

It hummed. In the death chamber where he had worked it hummed.

A police spokesman at North Point Station said that Mrs. Idris—

It hummed without cease. In the cocoon, in the redness, in the blood there was no end to the hum, to its loudness, to its insistence, to its increase—to all the papers, red on white, spilling out into the little holder and onto the floor while the machine hummed and hummed.

Redness. Red on white.

—The spokesman said the police were not seeking any other person in connection with the death and that—

It could not be turned off. It grew. It lived. It was her, reaching out.

From the grave—through the machine—she reached out.
The spokesman confirmed that police had taken possession of a letter left in the apartment block by Mrs. Idris—

He thought he saw an elephant.

That practiced on a fife:

—but declined to reveal its contents
.

He looked again.

"Daisy . . ." In Yat's, from the cocoon, from the humming machine, from inside, the voice said softly coaxingly, "Daisy . . ."

Blood. Everywhere inside the cocoon, flowing down the sides and filling it, drowning everything inside, there was the blood and the cries of the birds as the glittering machete cut them to pieces. Heads, wings: the birds had broken up in midair and they were falling like pebbles inside the cocoon.

Falling.

Falling . . .

"
Jakob!
"

"At length I realize," he said, "the bitterness of life."

NORTH POINT WOMAN IN DEATH FALL
Wrote Last Letter To Husband

Over and over in the cocoon, it hummed. It . . . hummed.

It—

It
consumed
.

"
Nei toh-so kei-shi hai uk-k'ei?
"

The smell in the apartment was awful. At the door to the bedroom, the caretaker, trying to swallow, said, "I speak English!" His hands were fists in front of him. He was clenching them, gripping hard, holding something back. Behind him the main room of the apartment was dark and curtained. It had not been lived in for some time. He looked down to his polished leather shoes and saw dust under them. The caretaker said, "I'm home most of the day. I'm a lay preacher at the North Point Chinese Baptist Church. I counsel people. They come here. I see what happens in the apartments—" His eyes were starting out of their sockets as he stared up from the floor to the closed bedroom door. "I see people come in who shouldn't be here and I—" The caretaker said, "My name is Shek Pak Kin—Peter Shek—I—I—"

Feiffer said gently, "Harry Feiffer." He had his hand on the doorknob wrapped in a handkerchief. He had holstered his gun. Feiffer said gently, "You don't have to stay."

"I have a duty to stay!"

"No."

"I have a duty to the owners!" He saw Feiffer's face. The eyes were blue, flicking back and forth watching him. He felt small. Standing next to the tall man he felt small, like a child. Peter Shek, brushing back his slicked-down hair, said almost as an excuse, "I knew her: Mrs. Idris. She was a Malay Catholic and she—" He asked suddenly, "Do you even know what she looked like?"

"No."

"She was a middle-aged woman with bad varicose veins! She was dumpy and she wore housecoats and—" The smell was from the bedroom. It was a smell he had never smelled before. It was death. Shek, his hands coming loose from themselves in front of him and starting to fly outward, said suddenly angrily, "Why are you in here if you don't even know what she looked like? This is her house!" He looked back into the room. It was clean, polished. "She wasn't a criminal! She was a respectable tenant!" He was losing control. He wanted to go. There was nowhere to go. He tried to look away from the blue eyes watching him. He tried to read what was in them. Shek, shaking his head, trying to pull away, being held by something invisible—something awful—said on the edge of hysteria, "You're not even the cop who came to see me after she died! You're from somewhere else! You don't even know what she looked like!" Shek said, "She was a good woman! She was lonely! Sometimes—she was a Catholic, not of my religion—sometimes—" He wanted to run. He was anchored to the floor. Everywhere was the awful, thick cloying smell. It was the smell of decaying meat and—somehow—in it, coldness. "—sometimes, on my rounds I heard her door open. I knew she was there. She wanted to talk. She wanted to accidentally run into me and talk—" He waved his hand, "No, not because she was anything to me—she was a respectable woman—but because she was so—because she was lonely." He looked up into the man's face. "Have you any idea how humiliating that must have been for her? Have you ever in your life waited for someone just so you could—" Shek said, "In God's name, what could we have talked about? The
plumbing
?"

"Mr. Shek—"

Shek said suddenly quietly, "Thank you." Beside the tall man he felt small, like a child. He saw Feiffer draw a breath.

"What about her husband?"

"I never saw him." Shek said, "No, I saw him once on the stairs. A small, old man with pale eyes—"

"Cataracts."

"And—" He looked back into the room. It was neat, orderly. There were two chairs. Shek said, "I don't think he came here much. I—" The chairs were waiting for someone to come in to talk. Maybe, time after time, as she opened the door a fraction— Shek said, "I counsel people who can't talk to each other anymore. I—I saw him on the stairs once and I called out to him in English that it was nice outside and he wouldn't need his umbrella and I saw him turn, but he didn't say anything." He said suddenly, distantly, "They don't. Sometimes, people don't. They have it in them, but there's something that stops it and they—" He was talking to a policeman. He said abruptly, efficiently, "I don't know. It's only speculation. I'm only the caretaker."