Frogmouth (7 page)

He reached the eighth step and his legs gave up. The ninth step and his legs came back, the tenth and the legs gave out. Willpower. The conquest of the flesh. Auden, accelerating, forgetting it was a hill, deep in psychic running, running for nothing, but running, running
through
, yelled, "You're done! You can't make it!"

The Tibetan yelled back, "Slob! European slob!" He was scampering up the hill, but
not in a straight line
.

Auden shrieked, "Tactics! There's more to success than brute force!" He was gasping. It was his brain complaining again. Auden, turning red, sucking in air wherever he could find a bit, yelled, "Never underestimate a European!" The Tibetan still had the cash clutched in his hand. Venality, it was always your undoing. It was the sport of the thing, the amateur triumph. Even as they begged him, Auden the Fleet would never turn professional: it was something deeper than mere cash—it was the triumph of the will. He heard the crowds at Nuremberg roar. He heard the people on the street looking up, gasp, he heard—

He heard Spencer shout, "Phil! Phil! I've got Wang's pension on you at twelve hundred to one!"

He was gaining on the Tibetan, inches away. He put out his giant, great glistening hand to grab him by the scruff of the neck. He looked down. He looked back. He was halfway up the sheer face of a mountain. Auden's brain said, "Shit—!" Auden said, "Shut up!" The Tibetan, in terror, said—

The Tibetan said, "Ow-wah!" and staggered. A tenth of an inch—a single lousy, miserable tenth of an inch from him—Auden saw his hand fly up and the money cascade into the air. He saw the Tibetan turn and look shocked. The Tibetan said— Coming a second after, Auden heard the sound. It was a popping sound. It echoed. The Tibetan said, "I've been shot!" He looked hurt. Auden, wavering, going down a few steps with the momentum, said, shaking his head as the man looked at him, "No . . . No, it wasn't me . . ."

He saw Spencer looking up with something in his hand. Auden shrieked, "You shot him!"

"I didn't!"

"You did!" Auden, only mouthing the words, mouthing with no air left, his legs all stilled and stopped and hurting like hell, shrieked, "
You shot him!
"

There were people running up the steps. They were after the falling money.

Auden, aghast, shrieked, "You— That wasn't fair!" Spencer yelled, "I didn't!" What he had in his hand was his stopwatch. Spencer yelled, "I didn't!"

"That wasn't sporting!" He never thought he'd live to hear himself say it. Auden, hopping up and down on the spot like a grasshopper with hemorrhoids, yelled with the minuscule amount of air his brain, getting even, allowed him, "YOU SHOT HIM!"

"HE'S GETTING AWAY!"

"YOU SHOT HIM!"

"I—" The Tibetan had reached the top of the hill, hobbling a little. Then he was gone. Spencer, shaking his head yelled, "IT WASN'T ME!"

Wasn't it?

No, it wasn't.

Spencer, ever mercenary, yelled, "GET THE MONEY!"

Auden reached down to get the money.

And something odd happened. Someone, somewhere, somehow . . .

. . . shot him too.

The door to the Detectives' Room flew open. Framed in the doorway, a vision of mirrors, trigrams, amulets, charms, lo pans and determination, was not the Assistant Feng Shui Man, but the ultimate, the great, the Master Feng Shui Man. They were playing in the big league.

The Master Feng Shui Man, the Clint Eastwood of the spirit world, said, "Huh." God, he was magnificent. He glittered, he glowed, he shimmered. A vision of light from his mirror-spangled singlet to his mirror-spangled shorts and polished knees, he turned slowly in the doorway cascading light and hope and determination. His lo pan was no second-rate piece of baked clay: it was gold, carried low in a tooled leather holster.

Constable Lim said in a whisper, "Wow . . ."

"Huh." Tight-lipped, hard-faced, taciturn, the Master Feng Shui Man, narrowing his already very narrow eyes, said in a rasp to the wall, in some secret magic language, "Go ahead. Make my day." (It had to be that. What else could it have been?)

Constable Lim said in a gasp, "Whoosh!"

The wall said, "AARRGGHH! Wah! HAAAA!" The entire wall, lit up by a sheet of lightning at the window, vibrating, said in a sound that pealed like the clappers of doom, "BOOOOMM!"

O'Yee shrieked to the Master Feng Shui Man as the door flew open again, this time, the Master Feng Shui Man not coming in, but going out, "Herk! Herk! Herk!" It wasn't the phones. It wasn't a Heavy Breather. It was
him
.

O'Yee, finally, desperately, as his last word on the subject, said, shaking all over, "—
Herk!
"

Auden, grabbing for the falling money, losing it, sending it up again into the air in a cascade as the crowds toiled up the hill with their hands outstretched and their eyes full of pillage, yelled down to Spencer, "Ow-wah!"

He saw the bullet lying on the step near his foot. It was a .177 round ball from an air rifle. He saw the hungry hordes coming for the money. He saw—

He saw—

He saw . . .

Phillip John Auden in today's extraordinary race from Marathon to Mount Olympus, in the Errol Flynn-John Wayne Self-Respect Stakes at 8:45
A.M.
also ran
. . .

All that was left were just the last few final syllables before the movie ran out, the lights came up, and all the people staring goggle-eyed at the flickering images of heat and dust, drama and passion went home. He rubbed at his arse.

Auden, still rubbing, said softly, "Aw . . ."

"Aw, Gee . . . !"

If he could have, he would have sat down on the step and wept with disappointment.

T
here had been no sexual assault. They had merely been killed. In the emptied-out kiosk, the government vet, Dr. Hoosier, closing the sternum-to-groin autopsy incision on the dog with number eight thread, said softly to Constable Lee watching him, " 'Thou met'st with things dying . . . I with things new-born.'" It was from Shakespeare's
The Winter's Tale
. He had seen it the last time he was at home in Toronto.

The dead creatures were everywhere in the room. The counter flap was open, but it did not dispel the smell.

The man obviously did not understand English. He looked down at Hoosier working on the ground with his instruments and had no expression on his face at all.

The man Feiffer had had the same look. There was only the faintest tightening of the muscles at the corner of Lee's mouth.

Hoosier, finishing the suturing and sliding the dog to one side to gut one of the peacocks, said quietly, " I am a feather for each wind that blows.'" That was also from
The Winter's Tale
.

He saw Lee redden a little.

Hoosier asked, looking up, "Do you speak English, Constable?"

He did. He wore a flash on the shoulder of his khaki uniform to show he had passed a course and spoke it fluently.

Lee said, "No." He looked down at all the dead things on the floor.

He stood watching, unchanging, unmoving, with no expression on his face at all.

He was the modern equivalent of Nam-mo-lo, the sorcerer ancient Chinese fishermen employed to keep their boats safe from evil spirits and influences. He was the Double Flag Man, the fishing junks' registration documents issuer. He provided the Communist flags and registration papers the Hong Kong junks used in Communist Chinese territorial waters and the Hong Kong flags and documents they used when they left them. He provided the Hong Kong flags and documents the Communists flew in Hong Kong waters and the Communist flags they flew when they went back home with their catch. He kept everyone's hold full. Somewhere, to someone he was probably liable for taxes. No one ever asked. He was some sort of Communist the Hong Kong fishermen could deal with on a friendly basis and, to the Communists, probably, equally some sort of not-too-bad capitalist. He was a commission agent, a shroff, a compradore. He had been in prison in China for displaying revisionist tendencies and, in Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution riots, he had been in prison as a dangerous radical. In Hong Kong, in Stanley Prison, he had kept birds. In the Hong Kong-China Dockyards off Beach Road, George Su, dressed in singlet and shorts, grimy, fiftyish, peasant-faced and with manicured fingernails and soft hands, said from his desk without looking up, "It's a primary plume from the left wing of a large woodland bird. Technically the feather is called a remex. The color—the look of a burned and blackened tree—means it's from a hot, woodland area of the world." All he had for his office in the dockyard was his desk. It looked like the sort of government-issue desk you saw in prison cells. It probably was. George Su, turning the feather over in his hand and glancing across past the rows of moored junks and sampans in the dock area toward the sea, asked Feiffer in Tanka, the language of the boat people, "What I heard about Yat's—is it true?"

"Yes, it's true."

Past the moored boats there were knots of people waiting to come forward and speak to him. George Su, shaking his head to them and changing from Tanka to Cantonese so they would not understand, said, shrugging, "Plumage is the coat which covers birds against the elements just as fur covers animals." He looked down at the feather and then back up to Feiffer. "The number of plumes, secondary, primary and the rest of it including down can range from about a thousand to twenty-five thousand depending on the needs of the bird." He was quoting it from somewhere, from a book he had read in prison or, like Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz, maybe one he had written. "Basically, as well as giving lift for flying, feathers are a form of insulation or waterproofing depending on whether the bird is a land or a sea creature. In this case, it's camouflage." He asked Feiffer directly, "Is this all you've got?"

"Yes." The piece of black umbrella fabric was nothing. It could have been from any of the fifty-three million black umbrellas manufactured in Hong Kong every year. It had been raining: that was the only reason the umbrella had been there. Feiffer, sitting opposite Su at the plywood desk and trying to see the papers the man had turned facedown when he had seen him coming, asked, "Is it a local bird?"

"No."

"How about China?"

"China is local." Su, smiling, said without force, "Hong Kong is part of China. When you ask if it's local I assume you mean regional. China isn't in the region of Britain, it's in the region of China." He was a man who supplied flags. Su said, still smiling, "Thank God, Harry, we're all peaceful realists these days." He held the feather up for Feiffer to see, sliding his fingernail down its length and, somehow, opening it up. "It isn't a bird from anywhere around here." He slid his fingernail back up the length of the feather and, somehow, closed it again. Su said, "The ornithological zip-fastener. That's what birds are doing when you see them preening. Each main feather is held in shape and in place by a series of little hooks and barbs to give elasticity when the bird flies. Sometimes the hooks become undone and the bird has to run its beak along them to zip them up again." He looked up to see Feiffer's face. "Didn't you know that?"

Feiffer said, "No."

Turning the feather quill point-on, Su said, "The little hole running up the calamus—the shaft—is for blood to carry nourishment to the feather." He asked, "Don't you ever watch birds?"

"Can you help me with anything, George? Anything at all?"

Su said, "It's a feather. It's from a bird."

"Someone dropped it."

"Did they?"

"Well, did they?"

He had been in prison. Su said, "How do I know? You ask and I reply."

"Can you speculate?"

"On what?"

"
On what the hell it is!
"

"It's a feather. Go ask an expert."

"You are an expert! I'm asking you!"

"I'm a man who kept birds in prison!" Su, looking up suddenly as the sound of his voice made all the people waiting for him tense, said, "What birds may mean to me probably means nothing to anyone else except me! I'm a Communist: a New Man—an organized, majority-respecting and self-denying New Socialist whose life is ordered and organized and set and fixed and predictable! The gaps in my existence birds may fill—"

"Is that what they fill?" Feiffer said quietly, "I watch and see them in the skies sailing and I—" He was leaning forward, his finger pointing at the feather on the table, almost touching it, "—And I don't know what I think."

There was a silence.

Feiffer said without tone, "I've never been in prison."

Su looked at him. Su said after what seemed like a long time, "Yes, you have. Yes, you are. Why else would you stop and look at freedom if you didn't covet it?" He saw Feiffer looking at him. "Dreams, Harry—" He touched at the feather, "This is a night bird. It hides during the day with its camouflage: it answers to no one, considers no one, doesn't hide in the darkness but is most free in it, and—" George Su said with a faint, soft smile on his face, "At night, in prison, before I got permission to keep just a few finches in my cell, at night, in the darkness, in the silence, I could hear the great birds and the swift birds and the birds over the sea wheeling and soaring and calling, moving across a sky I knew nothing about, seeing even my own country from a view I had never seen—a view no one, not even our great leaders had ever seen—and sometimes, I imagined, I thought—" He stopped. He said abruptly, "What there is when you stop to watch something high up in the sky, alone, moving without effort— free—that thing has no name. That thing is dissatisfaction." He said tightly, "That thing—looking, watching, wondering, wanting—that thing put me in prison in China." He looked, not at Feiffer, but at the Tanka-speaking fishermen waiting to see him and addressed them histrionically in the language he knew they did not understand: "All birds and creatures of the wild in the perfectly ordered and well-run modern society, be it socialist or capitalist, should be instantly removed from the sight of the workers lest they interfere with production levels!" He was the Double Flag Man. Somewhere, to someone he was probably liable for assessment. He had been assessed, twice. Twice, he had been found liable. Su said, standing up, with the feather a little from his face, "Plumage. It insulates, protects, waterproofs—that's all. It isn't a hue a man puts on to keep himself safe through life, it is merely a matter of necessity, camouflage."