Frogmouth (9 page)

They were the things of dreams, high, silent creatures in the air, looking down.

All he had was a single, unidentifiable feather.

On the steps of the Hong Bay library on Aberdeen Road, waiting for opening time, Feiffer watched the birds high out over the harbor.

He had in his pocket the address George Su had given him. Watching the birds, he touched at it with his hand to check it was still there.

He looked at his watch.

In Yat's, someone dreaming, perhaps for a long time, had awoken.

Far out to sea, there was still lightning from the typhoon on its way to Taiwan.

The dreams were of chaos and mutilation and death. Now, awake, they were no longer dreams.

He saw the birds wheeling and gliding and wondered what he thought.

He wondered what whoever it was who had suddenly awoken —he wondered what, now, at this moment, he was thinking of.

B
ehind a garbage skip in Annapura Lane off Old Himalaya Street, Spencer, scuffling around in garbage no one had bothered to put in the skip, said definitely, "He fired from here." He had the two squashed .177 caliber pellets from Sagarmatha Hill in a glassine envelope and he held them up and tapped them at the side of the metal box. "It was an air pistol"—he was stepping back, going through aiming motions against the side of the metal judging the height—"Not a rifle. He rested the barrel against the skip here to keep it firm and he swiveled it against the corner, bending down a bit to follow the moving targets."

One of those moving targets, Auden, looking not at the garbage around the skip, but at the hamburgers at the end of his ankles, said, "Hmm."

Spencer said, "See, here." There were two little splashes of what looked like vaporized oil on the gray metal of the skip. "Yeah, it was definitely an air pistol. He dieseled the weapon with a drop of oil in the breech to give it more range." He wondered if he had Auden's full attention. Auden was mouthing something out of the corner of his mouth. Maybe he was just taking in the information. Spencer said, "Actually, to say you 'fire' an air weapon is totally wrong. It's like a bow and arrow: you don't actually fire an air gun or a bow and arrow because there isn't actually any fire—what you do is
shoot
it." He leaned against the side of the skip and shot his finger in the direction of the hill. Spencer said, "It was a shot of almost forty yards, the one that got the Tibetan, and you, you were almost thirty yards—" He saw Auden about to say something. Spencer said quickly, "No, farther. You almost had him, Phil, so the second shot must have been almost forty yards too." He said, deciding, "Say thirty-eight yards." Spencer said solicitously, "It doesn't still hurt, does it?"

Auden said, "Yes." Auden said, "If there are guns around—if people are bloody shooting or firing and dieseling or whatever the ruck they're doing, it's time to call in the SWAT team and kill them." The Tibetan needed killing. Auden said, nodding up at the hill, "SWAT can lay in a sniper with a Remington bolt action and when the bugger gets to about step number sixty-five—"

"The Tibetan didn't shoot you!" Spencer, coming forward and pushing Auden hard on the shoulder to bring him back to reality, said, "The Tibetan—"

Auden said, "Ow!" He staggered. He limped.

Spencer said, "Phil, the physical exertion, I know—"

Auden said, "I put my shoes on!"

"It's best. If you don't, your feet will swell up." Spencer, trying to take his mind off it, said, "Dieseling: that's where, in order to increase the range of an air weapon, you put a little drop of light oil behind the pellet in the breech and then, when the blast of compressed air hits it, the speed of the pellet leaving the barrel is increased by the explosion of the oil." He said thoughtfully, "So, I suppose, in this particular case you could say he
fired
an air pistol."

In this particular case you could say he was about to fire a partner. Auden, still wincing, said, "You were down here. You should have heard it."

"An air weapon, especially one leaning against a metal object for steadiness, doesn't make a bang, it makes a—" He leaned down again. Spencer, pointing his finger and going "poof" to prove that fingers leaned against a metal skip made only a poof! noise said, "He must have allowed for the wind—"

"There wasn't any wind!"

"Well, he had to allow for that too." Spencer, still with the finger, said, "Pooff!" He looked at Auden, smiling.

Auden said, "I could have got him! If I hadn't been shot, I could have got him!"

There were two pellets in the envelope. Spencer, nodding with a total lack of sincerity, said, "Sure."

"I was inches away!"

"Well—" Spencer said, "Well, a few inches anyway." Spencer, tapping the pellets in the envelope, said, "You have to remember that the Tibetan was shot too."

"He was shot higher up than I was! He was shot five steps away—" Auden said quickly, "Four steps away and he was shot somewhere in the back! I was shot in the arse! I was in mid-stride." Auden said, "He was shot in the small of the back as he was turning around to give up! I was on top of him!" Auden said suddenly, mystically, "Bill, I
flew
!. I was
flying
! You know all that Zen stuff about becoming the object and the action and—that happened to me! I wasn't running, I was the running. I wasn't chasing the Tibetan I was the Tibetan being chased!" His feet, suddenly, in line with his enlightenment, stopped hurting. Auden, starting to hop up and down, to flex, to exercise, to work out, said without room for argument, "I did it! All that Om stuff! I became
Om
!"

Spencer said softly, "Poor old Wang."

"To hell with Wang! I did it for Wang at the beginning, but when I started running, when I hit the hill, when I was
ascending
—" Auden, coming forward and taking Spencer hard by the shoulder to put his face an inch from Spencer's nose, said in a hard whisper, "Bill, when all that happened, I became
One
!"

Well, Half anyway. Spencer, releasing himself from Auden's grip, said looking up toward the hill and then down at the two diesel marks on the side of the skip, "Well . . ." Spencer said, "You're right. Let's call in SWAT and have everybody killed."

"What about Wang?"

Spencer said, "To hell with Wang." Spencer said, brushing the thought away with his hands, "There are worse things in the world than a massive coronary at twenty-three years of age." Spencer, looking down with friendly concern at the two misshapen blobs of flesh stuffed into Auden's shoes at the end of his legs, asked, "How are your feet?"

"My feet are fine!"

"You said they hurt."

"I can rise above hurt." The hill also rose. It rose almost straight up. Well, if it hadn't where would have been the triumph? Hill, where was thy sting? Where the hell was his victory? Auden, looking desperate, said, "Make another bet! I'll take any odds you can get! Make another bet and this time I'll do it!"

"Phil, I couldn't promise you'll hear the gunshots. In all the noise—"

It was the noise of the cheering. Auden said, "If you close your body to all the assaults of the world, Grasshopper, how can death come in to claim you?" He remembered it from a kung fu movie on television. It must have been written by someone who had a deep knowledge of Zen. Or maybe who jogged a lot. Auden said, "I can do it! Give me the chance and I won't let you down! Give me a chance! A shot at the title!" Wrong movie. Auden, getting desperate, said, "What sort of fucking bookie gives an out-of-condition aging European odds of twelve hundred to one to catch a flying bloody Tibetan mugger on Sagarmatha Hill on the first attempt?' Auden said, 'It was a practice run! I was just walking the track! Even bloody racing drivers get a practice run!" Auden said, "I qualified! I made the time! I'm in the big race!"

"What about your feet?"

"My feet are merely vessels in which I place my—" Auden said, "My feet are okay." Auden said, "How many shots did your bookie give me? Really?"

Spencer said, "Five." He tapped at the diesel marks with his knuckle.

Auden said, "Quite right too."

Spencer, smiling, said in a whisper, "Phil, you were magnificent . . ."

Auden said, "Damn right I was!"

Spencer said tightly, "A Wang! A Wang!"

Auden said, "Right!" His feet hurt like hell. He looked across the road and saw the entire staff of the Russo Harbin Hong Kong Trading Bank standing outside their glass doors looking over at him. Auden shouted, "We're not done yet!" Auden, starting to do little running-on-the-spot exercises to limber up, shouted, "Bring on the Tibetan!" He wondered which of them was the girl. Auden shouted, "The bank's money—I'll defend it with my life!"

He was running on the spot on some garbage people were too lazy or too stupid to put properly in the skip. It felt like he was running on squashed hamburger meat. He wasn't. He was running on his feet.

Auden, to no one in particular, said, "Damn right!"

His brain never let him down. Coming on-stream, his brain took one look at his feet and, going
bang
!, made him go numb all over.

Outside the bank they were cheering.

Auden said, "
Yeah!
"

They all loved him.

He wondered, in the line of happy, cheering, waving fans, which one was the girl . . .

In the Hong Bay reference library reading room, Feiffer, with a pile of books on the table in front of him, said softly, "Shit . . ." It was hopeless. He had never known there were so many species of birds in the world. None of the books divided into birds of hot woodlands countries or dry, burned areas, but, rather, by the species themselves. All the names of the species were in Latin: the Latin, like the birds, like the climatic regions in which they lived or to which they migrated or from which they bred, crossed over and became nothing but an unending mass of lines of movement and distribution that told him nothing.

He was getting nowhere. He had the address George Su had given him in his pocket, but before he used it he had to have something.

He had a single feather.

He could not even understand the Latin names.

He had nothing.

He kept stopping in the books at the pictures of creatures so beautiful they took his breath away: birds of paradise, the Fairy Pittas, the birds of the deep forests of South America, the hornbills, great and elf owls, and all the eagles, hawks and ospreys that sailed high in mountains and above harbors. There were things he had never heard of: trogons, mousebirds, tanagers, bellbirds that made sounds in the trees like carillons of glass bells and birds known only by the sounds they made: the go-away bird, wait-a-while bird and even a gray crowned gregarious almost shot-out Australian bird that, over and over, made a sound like a Swiss goatherd or shepherd yodeling across mountains.

Once, in the early years of the century, in America, there had been millions of meat-bearing birds called passenger pigeons. They had been hunted for that meat.

Now, there were none. They were all dead and the species totally extinct.

In Yat's, everything there was also dead.

He knew the names of almost none of the birds in the books. Through all his life, the birds had been there all around him and he had seen none of them, bothered to. learn nothing, and he knew almost none of their names or what they were.

Outside, seen in flashes on the windows of the library, there was still lightning in the sky.

He looked at his watch.

10:00
A.M.
exactly.

In the books, it said, now, most of the birds of the world were fully and totally protected.

There was no one else in the library so early.

With the sound of his footsteps echoing in the empty, book-lined reading room, he went toward one of the corridors toward the index files by the enquiry desk at the main entrance of the place.

There was no natural history museum in Hong Kong. He had only what he could find himself.

He had only the books he could not completely understand or even find properly.

He had, in Yat's, something so awful he could not even find a name for it.

He had the address Su had given him.

He had a single feather.

10:00
A.M.

In the library his step rang in the empty room as the lightning, silently, persistently flashed at the windows.

Outside the window of the Detectives' Room, in the street, there was a little girl in a cotton dress on a bicycle pulling petals off a flower.

At the window, O'Yee said with tears in his eyes, "Oh . . ."

She had a Band-Aid on her knee.

O'Yee said, "Ahhh . . ."

He looked farther. There were cars, people, folks greeting folks, hot-chestnut sellers with hot chestnuts roasting on an open fire, smog, noise, stench, all the old familiar places . . .

O'Yee said, "Phew . . ."

. . . that his heart embraced. O'Yee said, "Aaahh . . ."

His heart embraced her. She was a skinny, knobbly-kneed, almond-eyed Chinese with gaps in her teeth. The flower she gently de-petaled one by one, singing her little soundless rhymes, was a plastic pansy.

Innocence—he remembered what that was. That was what little girls on bicycles were for—to remind you of it. O'Yee said firmly over his shoulder to Lim, "Did you ever see that movie
Frankenstein
? Did you see the scene where the monster with the skewer in his neck comes up to the little girl?" He didn't look back over his shoulder. O'Yee said, "She was playing with a flower too. This thing shuffles up to her going Rah! Rah! and looking like death and what the hell does she do—she gives him the flower!"

"And then he kills her. Right?" He hadn't seen the movie.

"No, he doesn't kill her! He realized that even down there in the depths of hell life is still beautiful and there's good in the world and he sits down there with her and smiles at her!"

Lim said, "It must be an old movie." He looked at the wall. The wall was silent.

"There are certain elemental truths in the world! One of those elemental truths is that little girls fall down and scrape their knees and that little girls gently take the petals off flowers! It's a reflection of a hidden truism that the world still retains some semblance of predictability and peace and comfort and—" O'Yee said something he had read in
Readers' Digest
, " 'Everything in the real world can be understood by reason, the other world—the next world—requires only love.'" O'Yee said, "This isn't happening. If it is happening it's something ordinary and because we're both so far from the basic elemental truths in the world that every little girl with a Band-Aid on her knee and a flower in her hand knows from birth we're running around frightened and confused." That was why he was a senior detective inspector: with age and travail came a wisdom no police training manual ever taught. O'Yee said, "No unearthly power can stand up to the light of innocence and love." It was true: he had never won with his own kids. O'Yee said, "You watch, I'll open the window and that girl will smile up at me and, just like that, there'll be a flash and everything will return to normal!"